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

Hank was frowning, rubbing his thumb against his bottom lip.


I gave him a few more seconds, then touched his hand. “Will you move in with me, Hank Clift?” I couldn’t meet his eyes, too scared of being turned down. “I hear the food isn’t so bad at my place,” I joked, hiding my anxiety with humor.


“I don’t know,” I sputtered. “I didn’t really think about that. I guess if you don’t want people to know, then living together wouldn’t be a good—”


“Wait. Wait.” Hank ran a hand over his face. “No, that’s not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is…Christensen, there’s nothing in this whole wide world that would make me happier than to live with you, in that wonderful little house of yours. Now, I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s gonna take some time for me to be comfortable with the idea of everybody in town knowing that I’m—well, that I’m—um, that I’m gay.”


I was so proud of him. “So I’ll hold off on hanging the rainbow flag on our veranda for a while.”


Chapter 74