"“I want you to take my virginity.”

Laurie paused with the cheeseburger halfway to his mouth. When he realized that Jonah wasn’t going to say anything else, he set the burger on his plate with as much careful precision as he would’ve used when handling a bomb. Assuming he’d ever touched a bomb…which, of course, he hadn’t.

He grabbed a napkin from the table and wiped his hands clean with equal care. Only after that did he lean back in his seat and meet Jonah’s eyes, which were regarding him with a hesitant, earnest expression. There was no levity in them, no glint of their normal humor. Jonah appeared to be one hundred percent serious. And that fact made Laurie one hundred percent terrified. He had a feeling he was going to be taking that cheeseburger to go.

“Come again?” he finally said, for lack of anything better. Because he must have misheard. There was no way in hell his best friend’s eighteen-year-old brother had just said those words. Over lunch. In the middle of a diner. With an old, white-haired couple sitting right behind them.

When Jonah had approached him and said he needed some advice, Laurie had been perfectly willing to lend an ear. He figured as a gay teenager, the kid probably didn’t have very many people to talk to about safe sex or boyfriends or relationships in general. And since he and Jonah’s older brother, Marcus, had been friends practically since birth, it made sense that Jonah would come to him. Jonah had been trailing after them since he was old enough to walk, always underfoot and wanting to be involved in whatever he and Marc were doing. Over the years Laurie had started to think of him as just another pesky little brother to add to the brood that constantly annoyed him when he was at home.

Until Jonah’s seventeenth birthday party when Laurie had caught Jonah making out with one his classmates in the basement. One of his male classmates.

That day, Laurie had learned he and Jonah had one very big thing in common. And he would’ve been lying if he said his perception of Jonah hadn’t changed after that. He started to notice things, like how Jonah’s skin was the perfect shade of pale gold, and his smile sort of took Laurie’s breath away, and how his tight little body was the type wet dreams were made of. But the more he’d noticed the harder Laurie had fought to keep Jonah locked away in the platonic, no-sexual-feelings-allowed section of his mind. If sometimes he failed and his thoughts wandered into fantasy territory at the sight of Jonah without a shirt, well, that was between him and his traitorous brain. No one else would ever have to know.

So, Laurie had listened to Jonah’s story about the guy he’d been dating toward the end of his senior year. The guy who had cheated on Jonah and then broken up with him because he wasn’t willing to waste his time on a “frigid little shit who wouldn’t put out.” Jonah’s eyes were shining with tears as he told that part and Laurie’s stomach had clenched with anger and sympathy. But Jonah didn’t need a guy like that and Laurie had told him so. There would be other guys. Better guys. Someone like that wasn’t worth tears. Might as well save the waterworks for when it really counted, and being dumped by some high school douchebag with an overinflated sense of self-importance so didn’t make that cut.

Jonah had nodded and agreed. Then, not five minutes later, those words had come out of his mouth. Words that Laurie still wasn’t sure he’d heard right. People didn’t just burst out with things like that over French fries and milkshakes in crowded, greasy spoon diners. Not when the bubblegum-chomping waitress could swing by at any second to ask if they wanted some apple pie for dessert. Talk about awkward.

“I want you to take my virginity,” Jonah repeated.

Laurie blinked at him. Okay. So those words hadn’t actually been some sort of warped, sugar-induced auditory hallucination. “I thought that’s what you said.”

“Just…just hear me out before you answer, okay, Laurie?”

“Look, I don’t think this is the best place for this conversation.” Laurie inclined his head toward the family of five seated at a round table a few feet away from them. One of the three towheaded boys was staring their way, his eyes magnified to double their size by thick-lensed glasses.

Jonah glanced over at the table and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But can we talk about it on the ride back?”

Laurie sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. Jonah’s virginity was not a topic he wanted to discuss, especially when it pertained to him being the one to divest Jonah of said virginity. But he and Jonah had a twenty minute drive back to Beckett’s Adventure Company and it wasn’t like he could gag Jonah to keep him from talking on the way there. “Fine. We’ll talk about it in the car.”

“Great,” Jonah said with a grin. And then he calmly went back to his food as if he hadn’t dropped a bombshell on Laurie’s head a few minutes before.

Laurie, however, found that his appetite was gone. Looked like he would be taking that burger home after all.