Chapter 5
Sunbern was vaping in the shadows of El Coyote’s parking lot when he finally spotted Shannon in Louboutin heels and Adidas
sweatpants strutting toward the Mexican restaurant, clutching her ubiquitous strawberry milk tea boba. She was very late—late
enough that he had triple-checked their text exchange to confirm that they had indeed agreed on Wednesday evening. But finally
she had come.
He whistled to himself, instantly smitten again. It had been almost a year since he had seen her in person, and his ex-fiancée
was still a stunner.
Sunbern met Shannon Shoo eight years ago when she was working as a bottle girl at a rooftop club in downtown Los Angeles,
back when he was still running around with his old entourage of fellow male models. Sprung by the Asian-baby-girl mashup of
her White Walker blue contacts and long blond ombre hair, he had tipped her a G and asked for her Snapchat, but she scoffed
at him.
“Sorry, I don’t fux with pretty boys,” Shannon had said.
“What about a pretty husband?” Sunbern replied, flashing his megawatt smile.
Their courtship was fast and furious, and sexy, literally.
Sex on Dan Bilzerian’s megayacht right before it sank, sex under Amal Clooney’s table after the Met Gala, sex in Auntie Roses’s guava orchard during Meadow’s sip-and-see.
Unintentionally dubbed SunShoo by a confused Wendy Williams and memed religiously by Subtle Asian Traits, Sunbern and Shannon managed somehow to be both empowering and embarrassing for Asian American representation.
The women of Sunbern’s family were rankled to see someone like Shannon with their only heterosexual bachelor, particularly
his mother, Hyacinth. Shannon was from a humble Chinese Vietnamese family in South El Monte and never graduated high school.
Her life aspirations did not go beyond being an influencer, though no one could ever quite figure out who or what was being
influenced. (“Seems more like it’s the cocaine influencing her,” April often dryly remarked.)
An increasingly desperate Hyacinth had decided to take matters into her own hands. On her birthday a couple years ago, she’d
invited the whole Sun Clan to her Manhattan Beach retreat for yet another of her holistic wellness weekends. In actuality,
she and her sisters were staging a surprise intervention for Sunbern, to encourage him to drop Shannon and find a more suitable
girlfriend.
But despite strict instructions that the attendees be family members only, Sunbern arrived in his leased Lamborghini convertible
with Shannon splayed out in the back, her voluminous bosoms spilling out over her trademark tube top. After flinging his Yeezy
jacket upon a very unamused Wayward, Sunbern had proceeded to kneel in front of Shannon on his mother’s idyllic private beach.
To the collective horror of the Suns, Hyacinth’s intervention had been hijacked into a most ironic proposal.
As tipped-off paparazzi in deafening helicopters circled above, still somehow unable to drown out Shannon Shoo’s squeals of
unbridled delight, the Sun Clan had exchanged ominous stares with one another. Clearly, more drastic measures were needed.
Bored of the dramatics and sitting on a sand dune in the back next to her stony-faced sister, Felicia, Lola had felt a tap on her shoulder. She’d looked up to see her Aunt Roses staring down at her expectantly.
After all, Lola was the family’s resident master of drastic measures.
After Sunbern shuffled nervously into El Coyote, he caught the hostess giving him a dirty look from her stand. Shit. Now he
was going to be paranoid all night about loogies in his drinks.
He decided he needed one last pep talk. Hovering near the front entrance, he quickly dialed Lola, who had been checking in
daily about his reunion date with Shannon. Sunbern was too thirsty for encouragement to realize how out of character this
was for his normally detached baby cousin.
Lola picked up after the first ring. “Sup, big cuz?”
“What if I’m not good enough for her anymore?” he groaned.
He heard Lola sigh over the line. “Then you move on,” she replied. “Then you have closure. But Sunbern . . . She’s the one
who was never good enough for you.”
Sunbern sighed as well. “Hey, Lo?”
“Yeah?”
He cleared his throat. “Don’t mean to be corny, but thanks for always being there for me.”
Lola was silent for a long beat. Then she finally relented, “I gotchu, big cuz.” The line went dead with a click.
Set aglow by the twinkling red Christmas lights overhead, Shannon Shoo was sitting at the tequila bar scrolling through her
phone when Sunbern slid into the space next to her. She glanced up at him, her big eyes framed by spidery long lashes, and
set down her boba.
“Hey, Mooncakes,” Sunbern crooned, with the effortless confidence of a grinning tiger.
Roses had never called Master Chu in the evening before, but for some reason he had not picked up her FaceTime that morning, which had sent Roses from preexisting panic into absolute tailspin.
Yesterday had been disastrous. She never expected Wayward to react that way; she had trusted that he would have faith in her
even if he did not fully understand her proposition. But instead of hearing all that she had to say, he had stormed out of
her office, as immature as she had come to expect of his cousins, but never of him. She had been gobsmacked.
And when she had woken up this morning, once again she’d been met with a deafening silence. That Wednesday marked the seventh
day in a row that she had not heard the crying.
The Sun matriarch could not put all the blame on Wayward though. She had very knowingly gone against Master Chu’s guidance,
which had been clear. Before she made the request of Wayward to father the Sunfang heir, Roses was supposed to first ask her
sister Iris for her blessing, as Iris was Wayward’s mother and bypassing that familial harmony would be energetically disruptive.
Though it was not ideal for her, Roses had readily deigned to seek her middle sister’s blessing. She duly laid the groundwork
for this by inviting all her siblings to her house that upcoming Friday, hoping to catch Iris off guard by announcing her
intentions for Wayward in front of their siblings, George and Hyacinth. Surely that would have worked, as Iris’s default was
always deferential, as long as she was not given the chance to do her overthinking. As a preemptive bonus, Roses had even
arranged to have Iris’s favorite lobsters flown in from the Norwegian coast.
Anyway, why did she have to ask for her sister’s permission, when it was Roses herself who was far closer to Wayward? Iris only had herself to blame for the frostiness between her and her son, so what good would her blessing be anyway?
For the umpteenth time that day, Roses sat at the vanity in her marble bathroom cave and tapped for Master Chu on her Sunfang
phone. The line rang and rang.
And rang . . . and rang.
Roses was about to fling the phone into her stone toilet when—
Mrs. Sun, I am so sorry for my absence.
She flipped the phone over to see Master Chu’s scruffy face appear on her screen. Master! she exclaimed elatedly in Cantonese. I was so worried to not hear from you all day.
Mrs. Sun, I have already tossed the coins for you today, and I am gravely concerned by what I am seeing. The old man’s wrinkled face was unkempt with white bristly hair, and the video glitched as he spoke. What has happened with Wayward?
It was awful, Master Chu. He did not take to the plan. He is young and rash and idealistic . . . I have told you all this
about him. Heirs and lineage and patriarchy, these go against everything he believes in.
The fortune teller was shaking his head in dismay. We knew he might prove to be bullheaded, but I am surprised at such defiance.
Roses was practically thrashing her phone in panic. The Sunfang Trust is in danger until we produce an heir! Should we move on from Wayward? Should we try April again?
No! The response was abrupt and resolute. The Sun Clan lineage must perpetuate through Wayward. It is he who possesses the lucky seed! My dear Mrs. Sun, it is Wayward . . .
or disaster!
Under pressure, Wayward was pushing with all his might, his hands clenched tight as he grunted loudly through his teeth. Beads
of cold perspiration ran down his temples.
“C’mon, Way, this is just pathetic.”
Spotting him from above, his cousin-in-law Cristiano Baccay shook his head mockingly down at him. “You used to bench two-fifty in college. You are getting soft, you corporate hack!”
“Kindly . . . fuck . . . off . . . ARRRGH!” With a bellow, Wayward fully extended his arms triumphantly. Then with another
loud yell, he did one more quick rep just for good measure, before reracking the barbell with a loud clank. He leaped up off
of the bench as Cristiano high-fived him.
“Not bad for a lil runt!” Cristiano cheered.
Wayward laughed. “Whatever, Dad Bod.”
Blasting classic Britney, the two men were working out in Wayward’s open garage under his town house in the Melrose District.
It was chilly now that the sun had just set, but they had built up a sweat as they always did in their Wednesday gym sessions.
Cristiano in particular looked hot in all senses of the word. He was wearing a tattered tank top from their high school days
that showed off the rippling striations of his bronze muscles. Certainly not a typical dad’s body.
Wayward in turn stripped off his athletic shirt and used it to wipe his brow and chiseled chest as Cristiano tossed him a
bottle of water. The impressive sight of the two of them together might have caused a double-take or two from the pedestrians
passing them by on the sidewalk, but the steadfast dynamic between Wayward and Cristiano was that of close brothers—after
all, they were lifelong best friends.
When Wayward was little, he’d been effeminate and endured a fair amount of bullying. That was, until eight-year-old Cristiano