Page 25 of The Token Yank

Eamonn yawned as they got on the commuter train, hands full with Asda bags. The shopping trip wore him out. He stumbled to a seat, and Rafe pretty much fell into the seat besidehim.

“I don’t know how people work and grocery shop and then cook all of this!” Rafe said. “I need to call my mom and thank her for her superhumanendurance.”

Eamonn smiled out the window. He lost track at how many times Rafe made him laugh today. He’d never had this much fun inside a bloody Asda. It really was a different world, like Rafe said. There was no Nathan and no bad memories inside thesuperstore.

“Is everything okay?” Rafe grinned up at him, and Eamonn had this impulse to wrap him in a tight hug, which he resisted. He couldn’t try to start anything with him. Rafe was leaving in a few months. Starting anything with him was a one-way ticket to getting hurt, something Eamonn didn’t want to go throughagain.

“Yeah.”

Like they said in the dairy aisle,relationships: who needs ‘em?

Eamonn watched the landscape change out the window. There was magic out there that only Rafe could see, he thought. He wondered what it was like to be so far away from home. Eamonn hadn’t traveled in years, and he wasn’t planning on doing so anytime soon. He had plenty of adventure in England. Still, seconds before the train lulled him to sleep, he imagined himself in America, staring up at the Statue of Liberty, Rafe at hisside.

The conductor announced theirstop.

Eamonn blinked to life. He saw that sometime during his nap, Rafe had fallen asleep against his shoulder, and Eamonn’s arm was around him. It was one of those actions that seemed completely natural. Their bodies just fit together, like some kind of instinct Eamonn didn’t know he had. He smelled the warm scent of Rafe and pulled him close for asecond.

Rafe emerged from his nap, but not even he seemed surprised by the position he found himself in. “You have a very comfortableshoulder.”

“And you snore like afoghorn.”

He bolted up. “Ido?”

“Just taking the piss out of you.” Eamonn took back his arm and looped his hands through grocerybags.

“I didn’t snore,right?”

“Right.” That was a lie. The truth was that Rafe did snore a little on the trip, a quiet, steady drone. But there was a greater truth, that Eamonn had found it quiteendearing.