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

“Drika…I want this so desperately.” I looked up at her like a child. “I think about it all the time. We could live together. We could make it work. We could have such a beautiful, wonderful home, and I’d make a garden of his life.”


“You will, Chris.” She put her warm hands on my face, her motherly touch calming me. “You already have.”


That evening, I sat with Roy and Shirley in my living room, trying to follow their conversation, but constantly checking the window behind my armchair for Hank’s rental car. Hank and his father were over an hour late. In the hall behind us, Troy was crashing the remote control car Roy had bought him into my furniture or walls. My nerves were tight, but I did my best to conceal my anxiety.


Hank would call any minute now, I was sure of it. He’d tell me that they’d caught some traffic at the border and were running a little behind. There was no need to get myself worked up.


Chapter 69