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

The next morning, the sound of Troy’s voice woke me, and leaning back against the pillows, I squinted at the bright light flooding my room. I must have forgotten to draw my curtains shut last night. I’d been under the influence of codeine and whiskey and had stumbled to bed in my clothes, quickly falling into a turbulent sleep.


As I slowly came around, yesterday’s events played over in my mind. So then it hadn’t all been just a nightmare. I remembered that after Jill had stitched me up, John and Drika had driven me home, and we’d talked for a long time at the kitchen table, going over the events of the last month. They’d both been supportive and had tried their best to reassure me, but the second they’d left my home, I’d poured myself a drink and thrown myself a decent pity party. What would happen now? Would folks really boycott my business?


At least I’d had the restraint not to call Hank in the emotional state I was in.


Chapter 53