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

“What were you up to?” Hank asked, right away.


I got comfortable on the couch, settling in for a long conversation. We hadn’t had one of those yet. Hank wasn’t much of a phone person and he’d been distracted this week, dealing with a hundred little details about work, his home and of course, his father. “Not much. Just waiting for your call…How are you?”


There was a short pause and I could feel tension on the line. “I spend the afternoon cleaning out the house gutters,” he said. “I hadn’t time to do that in more than a year and so, it was a mess up there.”


“Yeah? You should have seen my face today,” I quickly said, resorting the humor. “Now that was a mess.”


Chapter 38