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

“Hi,” I greeted everyone shakily, sitting in the chair beside Donnie’s.


Aleid nodded at me. Donnie’s father was a handsome blond in his early forties with a reddish beard. “Hey.” he said a little coldly, as usual. Try as I might, I never could get the man to warm up to me. But it was no surprise—Aleid was known to be homophobic. There were stories about him. People said he’d been quite the bully back in high school.


I’d hoped my friendship with his sister could have changed his views, but even after two years, he still wouldn’t give me the time of day.


“How are you holding up?” I asked Donnie, who was sitting stiffly in his chair. Drika was his favorite person in the world. I knew he was trying hard not to cry in front of his stoic father.


“All right,” he said, quickly looking down at his tattered paperback book. He was reading Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show


Chapter 18