Margot and I had been living together for two years now. Finding Tofino too limiting, we’d reluctantly made the move to Vancouver about a year ago. She’d set up her own small catering company, and I’d left the survey business to resume work as a freelance photographer. To put it mildly, we were now living something of a hand-to-mouth existence. We’d learned a lot about each other in the past twelve months. I wasn’t the go...

Our marriage of convenience broke up in Yellowknife. We’d been together for about three years. She was Swiss-French, and I was English-Canadian. Meeting in Indonesia, we’d travelled together for two years, overland through Asia to Europe. Then a year in Switzerland working at a ski station. Then six months in the Baja living on a beach in an old Volkswagen van. When we started running out of money, we drove back up to Can...

Margot worked as a sous-chef in a restaurant owned by friends of mine. We’d crossed paths a few times, but nothing of consequence had ever happened between us. From a distance, I had taken note of her extraordinary pale gray eyes, and the way she spoke with the faintest of lisps. Kind of sexy, actually. I also knew that she had a boyfriend: a brawny one. Erring on the side of caution, I always kept my conversations with h...

It was the late nineties. I was twenty-two and had just arrived back in Santiago after six very long months in southern Chile. Hired by a Canadian forestry company, I’d been managing a large timber survey about as far south in Patagonia as you could get. Further, in fact. When the highway stopped, we’d taken a boat for another eight hours to the isolated logging camp. What followed was backbreaking work, rain, wind, and a...

It was morning now, around 7 a.m.  While Kate, Jacob and Megan slept, I’d gone back into the house, quietly grabbed a jacket and some boots, and headed off for a pre-dawn walk in the Mendocino Headlands. Three hours later, trudging along the cliffs in the early light, I was no closer to resolving my conflicts about Kate. I was feeling both incredibly fortunate, and increasingly unsettled. Fortunate, because I’d never met...

It was now mid-March, and we were returning home from a month in Bali.   During the first week of our trip, we’d focused our attention totally on Michelle, trying to pack as much as we could into seven short days.   After she’d returned home to Switzerland, the next three weeks in Ubud had settled into a comfortable routine for Kate and me. Sleep in, make love, sleep some more, explore Ubud, and then make love again. It w...

Kate and I had been seeing each other for more than six months now.   After crossing paths for ten years, we’d finally become an item last summer.    From the outset, we’d agreed to an open relationship.  ‘Open’ in the sense that, while we would always be each other’s primary lover, there would also - especially in Kate’s case - be others.  I readily accepted this: she was the most intoxicating woman I’d ever known, and I...

It was mid-September, but the weather was still unseasonably warm.  There were no signs yet of autumn colour. Kate and I had now been seeing each other for almost three months, and I’d started introducing her to some of my closer friends. This weekend, she was set to meet Ethan and Jenna, who I’d known for more than 20 years.   They were a long-term couple that owned a small, ‘farm to table’ bistro in Tofino, on Vancouver...

Kate’s first visit to my house in the country had been quite the experience.  The sex that weekend had left my head spinning for days. She called two weeks later, asking if she could come out again.  I jumped at the chance.  The following Friday, her car pulled up to the house at around 5 PM.  The July skies were still bright, but I could see a thunderstorm gathering slowly on the horizon. I stepped out to greet her, my h...

We’d known each other for many years, getting together about once a month. Kate had been cutting my unruly head of hair for more than a decade.  When we first met, she was in her twenties: sharp, lively, full of questions and ideas.  Often, as she worked, we’d talk about everything under the sun: travel, politics, music. At other times, we said very little, preoccupied with our separate lives and problems.  But every time...