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

All was quiet. Not a car in sight. I must have stood in place for minutes, until I finally glanced around the sunlit room, slowly reconnecting with my surroundings. It was ten a.m. and the lunch shift was only a few hours away.


Time stretched before me, that old familiar loneliness seeping through the café’s walls, oozing back into my life, into my soul.


No, I wouldn’t let it take over me. I wasn’t that lonely man anymore. I was a man waiting for his lover to return.


In the meantime, I had a business to run. A house to make ready for Hank. There was no time to dwell on things.


A few minutes later, as I was gathering up plates in the dining room, I heard a car pull up and turned to see John parking his mail truck by the door. He stepped through the door, clad in his uniform. “Just crossed Hank’s rental on my way here. He’s not leaving town again, now is he?” John walked up to the counter with a pile of mail.


Chapter 75