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

“You have a life, Christensen. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You’ve made a garden out of it. My life is a desert. There’s nothing in it to water anymore. Sometimes I hate myself for having the arrogance to ask a man like you to wait for me to make up my fucking mind and—”


“Hank, don’t.” I stood, the blood rushing through me. “Please, don’t say it’s over.”


“Chris, I can’t leave here. You know that, right? And you’ve built such a perfect world out there. So where does that leave us? I’m used to living in a desert, but how long can I ask you to go without being touched? And the idea of another man having what I can’t have with you would be enough to send me over the edge of sanity. Don’t you get it?”


“I don’t want another man. I won’t even consider it. You don’t have to torture yourself over that. I won’t—”


Chapter 39