Page 123 of The Rehoboth Retreat
Hudson
One year.
Three hundred and sixty-five damn days.
And I still check Miles Whitaker’s Instagram stories like a jilted ex with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a Google search forhow to win back the love of your life without looking like a stalkerin the other.
Only now, the tequila’s been replaced with protein shakes and overpriced adaptogenic mushroom tinctures, because I’m technically a responsible adult these days. And Google? Well, I fired her. She never gave me the answers I wanted anyway.
Let’s get one thing straight—I didn’t pine. Not at first. I worked. Like hell.
Four months after I left Rehoboth Beach and wrapped the first movie, I landed another lead role—this time inBlood Voltage: Nightstrike. A dark, brooding adaptation of a cult-classic video game, it cast me as a half-human, half-cybernetic vengeance machine named Kade Virell, who hunts down corporate warlords in a post-apocalyptic metropolis. There were guns. There were smirks. There was an unfortunate leather trench coat I had to wear in 113-degree desert heat. It premiered to sold-out showings, and Rotten Tomatoes called itshockingly nuanced. I think they meant that as a compliment.
Five months after that, I landedNeon Crusader, a superhero origin flick where I wore a rubber suit that hugged my ass so tightly I thought it might cut off circulation to my brain. I played Jetman, a bisexual sky-surfing vigilante with trauma and cheekbones sharp enough to slice through federal crime. Critics loved it. Fanboys dressed like me at Comic-Con. Someone even got a tattoo of my face—well, Jetman’s face—on their calf, which still haunts me when I close my eyes.
The roles just kept pouring in.
I was back. The bad-boy Hollywood Phoenix rising from the ashes of scandal and wine-stained gossip columns.
And yet…
Underneath the flashbulbs, the premieres, the humiliating but very well-compensated talk show interviews… I still felt hollow. Like I left something important in Rehoboth Beach. Like a suitcase I forgot to pack.
Except it wasn’t a suitcase. It was a man.
Miles Whitaker.
Mother fucking damn it.
He was stillhim. Polished. Precise. A gentle menace with a mandoline slicer. I followed him on all his social media platforms. Quietly, of course. Never liked a post. Never commented. But I saweverything.
He had that same crisp, coastal aesthetic I used to tease him about—thecottagecore meets neurotic geniusbranding that he pulled off so effortlessly. Everything was still draped in light pastels and artful napkin folds. Only now… he had leveled up.
His new HGTV show,Perfectly Placed,was a runaway hit. He’d go into people’s cluttered homes like some kind of beige-clad avenging angel and reorganize their entire lives—pantries, closets, emotional trauma, all of it. Moms loved him. Dads flirted with him. TikTok reenacted his signaturelabeling sigh.
And now?
Now, the man was also launching a Food Network series next week.Organized Bites.A half-cooking, half-lifestyle show where he taught viewers how to braise short ribsandcreate a color-coded spice drawer while wearing a monogrammed apron. It hadn’t even premiered yet, and it was already trending.
I watched the trailer five times in a row.
And you know what?
I wasn’t bitter.
I wasproudof him.
Because I knew what he’d been through. The cheating ex. The stress. The pressure to be perfect. And still, he climbed.
Meanwhile, I was in a glass-walled condo in West Hollywood with a fridge full of sparkling water I never drank and a view of the city I barely noticed anymore. My agent told me I had six offers sitting on my desk. Streaming series. A trilogy. An invitation to host the after-party of the fucking Oscars.
But none of it mattered.
Not really.
Because the one person I wanted to share all of this with—the one who saw me at my absolute worst, who held me when I discussed my history about my family, who made me laugh so hard I spilled Bloody Mary mix down a Ralph Lauren dress shirt—wasn’t here.
He never was mine, not really.
