Everyone wondered where River Rathe went. I'd scroll through the industry rags on my phone, thumbing past the clickbait headlines, and every third article still had his face plastered across it. "River Rathe: Hollywood's Missing Prince." "Where Is River Rathe? Fans Demand Answers." The speculation was endlessârehab, burnout, some secret scandal buried by his PR team. Nobody landed anywhere close to the truth.
He was supposed to be the next big young male heartthrob. That was the consensus. He'd burst onto the scene at eighteen with an indie darling called Tidewater that had swept through Sundance like a brushfire and had made a pretty impressive run that award season. I'd watched a few interviews on my laptop in my kitchen, eating cold leftover pad thai, and I remembered thinking: this kid has something. The camera had caught him mid-laugh, halfway through some heartfelt story about his motherâs support, and there was this rawness to himâthis unpolished, genuine thing that the industry vultures would normally carve up and sell in pieces. But he'd held onto himself.
His manager was sharp. I'd later learn Carla was a brassy woman from the Bronx who'd clawed her way up from mailroom jobs and had a nose for career architecture like nobody else in the business. She'd helped River curry that indie goodwill into a supporting role in a blockbuster with big names attached. Suddenly his name was next to an A-list director, two bankable leads, a budget that could fund a small country. River had played the younger brother, the one who dies in the third act, and he'd stolen every scene he was in. I remember attending an industry screening and sitting in the theater just watching him share the screen with actors who'd been working longer than he'd been alive, and he didn't just hold his own. He made them look like they were working to keep up with him.
The big movies kept coming. A sci-fi franchise. A war epic. An impressive filmography for a kid who hadnât even turned twenty two yet. But he kept a few smaller projects in the mix. Just enough to keep the award buzz circulating and his name fresh in the mouths of the people running the industry. From there, his name recognition only grew. I'd seen a thousand guys like him come and go over the years. Pretty faces who caught a wave and rode it straight into the rocks. A meteoric rise was usually accompanied by a meteoric fall when people started looking under the surface and found out the talent was an inch deep. But River was the real deal. I'd watched his work closely enough to know the difference. He had range. He had instinct. He had that thing you can't manufacture. The camera just wanted him.
And then he'd just disappeared.
I'd taken a different path to stardom. A longer one, a harder one, the kind where you earn every square inch of ground. I'd worked my ass off for years in network tv, grinding through guest spots and two-episode arcs on shows that got canceled mid-season. Then I'd landed a recurring role on The Long Dark, a moody drama that danced the line of comedy that nobody expected to survive its first season. A mix of luck and hard workâand I mean real hard work, the kind where I was the first one on set and the last one to leave, where I treated every single line like it mattered even when the writers handed me clunky dialogueâled to me being promoted to series regular by the end of its run. Five seasons. The show had become a cult classic, the kind that people kept discovering years later and obsessed over online, dissecting every frame.
Practically the entire cast got Emmy nominations for our final season, and I'd pulled out a win. I still remembered standing backstage afterward, the statuette cold and heavy in my hands, sweating through my rented tux. I'd called my mother from the bathroom stall and she'd cried so hard I couldn't understand a word she was saying. Afterward, I'd been expecting to be rolling in offers. That was supposed to be the part where the doors flew open. But they didn't materialize. Not the way I'd pictured it, anyway.
I made the move to film and took a role in a romance called Last August. A period piece, lush and overwrought, and I played the brooding love interest opposite a talented actress who's since become a good friend. That movie had seemed like my big breakâit performed well, it got attention, it put me on magazine covers. But I found myself getting typecast as the male romantic lead. Every script that landed in my inbox was a variation on the same character: the handsome brooder, the guy who stands in the rain waiting for someone to come back, the one whose only job is to look tortured and pining. I found myself missing the range of work I'd had in TV, where I'd played a character who was messy and contradictory and sometimes genuinely unlikable. I missed the complexity. I missed the mess.
So I turned down every role that was offered to me. My agent, a patient woman and a godsend named Deborah who'd been in the business longer than I'd been alive, would call me weekly with scripts and I'd read them and pass. Eight months I spent off set. I still had brand workâa fragrance deal and a clothing partnership that required minimal effort and paid well enough to keep me afloatâbut Deborah was getting antsy. She'd started leaving voicemails that opened with long sighs. "There's a romcom this time, it's got financing, it's a good roleâ" and I'd read it and it was the same thing in different clothes. I was holding out for something worth doing.
Finally, the right script came across my desk. A drama with a prestige director/producer, Marcus Webb, attached. Marcus had a reputation for being demanding and brilliant, the kind of director who squeezed performances out of actors that they didn't know they had in them. The script was dense, layered, a story about two men connected by a shared loss that slowly revealed itself to be something else entirely. When I first read the script, the role scared me. That was how I knew it was the right one. I prepared like hell for the audition.
That's when I first met River.
He walked into the chemistry read already attached to the role, and I understood immediately why the entire industry had been obsessed with him. He was shorter than I'd expected, but that was something the camera always lied about, yet he made up for it with this presence, this gravitational pull that made the air in the room shift. Dark curly hair that he kept pushing back from his forehead with an impatient hand. A strong, square jawline and eyes that were almost unsettling in their directness, like he was reading you while you were reading him. I needed to show the producers that I could not only go toe to toe with this young actor, but really create something special with him.Â
He'd smiled at me across the table, a quick flash of white teeth, and said, "Big fan of The Long Dark. That scene in the hospital hallway in season five was incredible." I'd nodded, something warm settling in my chest, and we'd gotten to work.
River and I were a great pair right from the start. We co-starred in the movie together but in reality I didnât see him much in the next few months. It was the back half of the film where our characters' relationship really ignited and we had more screentime together. We had heavy emotional scenesâarguments, confessions, a climactic confrontation that required us to go to places that weren't comfortable. River had suggested we meet at my place after a day of shooting to run lines. "I work better in someone else's space," he'd said, shrugging one shoulder, like it was nothing. "Studios feel like dentist offices." So he'd started coming to my house in the hills, this low-slung mid-century place I'd bought a few years ago, tucked into a quiet street above the city.
We'd sit on my couch with the script between us, and we'd read. At first it was professional. Focused. He'd circle passages he wanted to discuss, I'd make notes in the margins, and we'd work through the beats with the precision of two people who took the craft seriously. But the scenes we were doing required vulnerability, and you can't manufacture that in a vacuum. To play two people who are falling apart together, you have to let something real bleed through the cracks. I started noticing things. The way he'd press his thumb against his bottom lip when he was thinking. The way he'd laughâreally laugh, not the polished interview laughâand his whole face would change, and I'd catch myself watching his mouth. The way he'd lean into me when a scene got intense, his shoulder brushing mine, and neither of us would pull back. I was studying him just as much as the script.
One night, after we'd been running the same scene for three hours, he'd set the script down on the coffee table and looked at me. Just looked at me. The room was quiet except for the bugs outside and the low hum of my refrigerator. His pupils were blown wide in the lamplight, and his chest was rising and falling a little too fast for someone who'd been sitting still. I didn't move. I didn't breathe. He reached over and put his hand on my knee, and his fingers were warm through the denim, and that was it. That was the crack in the dam.
I pulled him into me and kissed him, and he kissed me back with this hunger that I hadn't expected. It was deep and urgent, his tongue sliding against mine, his hand gripping the back of my neck hard enough to sting. I'd wanted him. I'd been wanting him for weeks, maybe, in that slow-burn way where you don't let yourself name it until it's already consuming you. He was the hottest guy in the business and he was in my living room with his tongue in my mouth, and I wasn't about to turn down a night with him.
We didn't make it to the bedroom the first time. I had him against the hallway wall, my hands everywhere, shoving his shirt up over his chest, my mouth on his throat. He was gasping, these broken sounds that went straight to my cock, and when I got his jeans open and wrapped my hand around him, he'd thrown his head back and hit the wall and said my name like it was the only word he knew. I'd dropped to my knees right there on the hardwood floor and taken him into my mouth, and he'd fucked my throat with his hands shaking in my hair, and I'd loved every second of it. Every thrust, every choked-off moan, the way his cock hit the back of my throat, I savored it all and I swallowed around him until he came so hard his knees buckled.
But one night turned into two months. Two months of him showing up at my door with takeout and a script, and the script would get abandoned somewhere after half an hour running lines while we tore each other's clothes off. I bent him over my kitchen counter and ate him out until he was sobbing. I fucked him slow on the living room floor with the curtains open and the city lights spilling across his skin. He rode me in my bed at three in the morning, his head thrown back, his throat exposed, my hands gripping his hips like I couldnât risk letting him go while he ground down onto my cock and whispered filth that would have made his PR team collectively faint. I came inside him every single time. I couldn't stop. The thought of my seed filling him, marking him, claiming him from the inside was an obsession that lived in the back of my skull like a fever. I'd hold him afterward, my cock still twitching inside him, and he'd press his face into my neck and I could feel his pulse hammering against my skin, and I'd think: more. I need more.
Then the movie wrapped. I had conflicting emotions about it. Iâd never been a part of something so special. What weâd created together was going to make a real impact on audiences. I was so immensely proud of it but I felt my heart sink at the thought that this was the end of something. River and I both had projects directly after we filmed our final scene so we wouldnât get to spend as much time together.Â
It had been a panicked phone call a few weeks after wrapping. I'd been in my trailer between shots after a long night shoot the night before, still half-asleep, when his name lit up my phone screen. I picked up and he was quiet for too long. Then he said, "I need to come over," and his voice had this quality to it that was thin, stretched, like wire about to snap. I played sick and rushed off of set and raced home. He was sitting in his car outside my gate and pulled in after me. I jumped out of my car and rushed to his drivers side door, wrenching it open. I kneeled by his side when I caught the look on his face and then he reached into the center console and pulled out a white stick in his trembling hand, and when he looked up at me, his eyes were wet and his face was pale and he said, "I don'tâI don't know how this is possible." I didnât either but I'd been coming inside him every night for two months, flooding his guts with every load I had, and apparently the universe had decided that was enough.
I'd pulled him against my chest. He'd shaken against me, these full-body tremors that I could feel in my teeth, and I'd held him and said nothing because there was nothing to say. We sat there until his bathroom floor got cold and the morning light shifted through the window. Then I said, "We're doing this. We're having this kid." And he'd pulled back and looked at me with those dark, direct eyes, and he'd nodded.
Iâd bought him a ring, not a wedding ring, but something to symbolize our commitment to each other. I gave it to him the day he moved in with me. It was cheesy but heâd smiled as he slipped it on and my heart almost burst from how happy I was that this man was mine.
River mostly sat out the press tour, citing exhaustion and a scheduling conflict, and there were a thousand rumors and conspiracy theories spinning through the entertainment ecosystem. Nobody guessed the real reason. Nobody came close. Because the real reason was that I'd gotten him pregnant.
We rearranged our lives with the kind of coordination that only Carla and Deborah could manage. River's public absence was explained as a creative sabbatical. I finished my next project and took a producing deal that kept me working from home. We told no one outside a tight inner circle. And River was sequestered away in the privacy of my home in the hills, where the paparazzi wouldn't guess to look and the only sound was the wind through the canyon and his breathing beside me in the dark.
His belly continued to grow. Iâd find him taking in the afternoon sun out on the deck when I got home. Heâd turned to just wearing sweat shorts as paternity wear and his fingers had swelled too much for the ring so he wore it around his neck. I didnât mind. Heâd stopped wearing underwear too so it was so easy to slide into him and make love to his swelling body. I dumped load after load in him knowing my seed had already taken root but not being able to buck the instinct to breed him.
After the kid was born, he'd go back to work like nothing had happenedâCarla already had three scripts waiting for him, and he'd slip back into the industry's embrace as seamlessly as he'd left it. But I already wanted to put another kid in him. The thought lived in me like a second heartbeat, this primal, possessive need to breed him again, to fill him up and watch his body change and know that I'd done that. That he was mine.




















