Two years ago, Chris and his boyfriend left the city to settle in a small town at the US-Canada border. Eager to start a new life, Chris bought the Frontier Café, but a year later, his boyfriend dumped him, leaving Chris the only openly gay man in town. Nowadays he's resigned to a life of romantic solitude.<br><br>Hank spent the last years traveling through the country for his job as a water plant engineer. Deeply closeted, he's careful about the men he meets. Like the rivers he studies, he runs fast through the land.<br><br>In town only for a few weeks, Hank is intent on getting the job done and returning home out west to take care of his father. But Chris’s warm manner and decadent desserts are no match for Hank’s defense mechanisms. For the first time in his life, he finds himself wanting to go with the flow.

No River Wide Enough

“I don’t know. Seems like he’s always riding by these days. I think he likes you.”


“Oh, gimme a break,” I said, getting out of my chair. Donnie was seventeen years old. A bit of a loner. I’d loaned him a few books in the past, but that was it. “He’s a kid.”


“Thanks for the talk. And the wine.” I kissed the top of her head. I despised rumors and refused to fuel them. As the only openly gay man in town, I’d had more than my share of lies said about me since moving here.


Thankfully, Shirley caught on. “Don’t give up on yourself, okay?” she said, looking up at me with a smirk. “You never know what could happen tomorrow. Maybe something amazing is coming your way, right this minute, and you don’t even know it yet.”


“Tomorrow is the country fair,” I said, with a sardonic grin. “I doubt anything will happen to me, except a heatstroke, a headache, and swollen feet.”


Shirley raised her glass at me and then drained it. “Never know, Christensen. You just never know.”3


Chapter 4