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Has that scar always been there? It’s hard to tell as Julian attempts to refocus his eyes under the constantly shifting hues of the club lights. The subject of his stare is not being very helpful as he just cannot sit still.
Nick’s always been like that—fidgety, perpetually in motion, annoyingly observable. Julian supposes he shouldn’t be surprised he’s so miserable right now, anyone in his place would be.
Thirteen hours. In thirteen hours he would be married. God, where did all the time go? It seems like it was just the other day that he and the boys were in the bus, hearing Last Nite play on the radio for the first time.
Nick’s head in his lap shooting up at the sound of his own guitar; the young, wild expression on his face stuck to Jules’ brain like sticky bubblegum. Fab and Albert shook Nikolai awake to alert him, and Nick leaned over to give Jules a big, wet kiss on the mouth in excitement. That memory was one of very few that he could remember in full detail.
Man, growing up fucking sucks.
Oh, but Juliet, sweet Juliet. How he loved her. Her lovely chestnut hair, kind of short and wavy. Her cheekbones, the ones that made her smile Jules’ favorite. Her eyes, lightning blue and almond shaped—oh and her hands. Long, slim fingers, pretty ones, the kind that can stretch across a fretboard with mesmerizing ease—hold on.
Fuck, he’s drunk. As he stares at Nick’s ever-moving presence, he thinks about the first time he saw him.
—
His hair was shorter, limbs more awkward, but he was always beautiful. They were in high school, Nick was in his woodworking class—that kind of elective class that had both upper and lowerclassmen. He had the stupid protective goggles on and some girl Jules didn’t recognize was poking fun at him. Flirting, he guessed. Nick didn’t seem all that bothered by her, not anymore at least, not once his eyes met Julian’s.
Ever since, Jules’ life was led by Nick. He was amazed by how little Nick knew of himself. Nick had no idea that he was way too pretty, had no idea that he talked far too much, and he cared too much, and it took too little to upset him, and Jules really couldn’t help but go out of his way to take advantage of these traits.
—
When Nick was 19, Julian was 21, and he recalls sneaking him into bars was easy enough, but Nick was always infinitely grateful.
The Modern Age was going insane overseas, they’d heard, and today, they’d signed with RCA for a huge 5 album deal. Worthy cause to celebrate, they figured.
The other boys had already ditched the town to go home with some pretty older girls, and that just left Nick and Julian out at the only bars still open.
“Thanks, Jules. Really, man.” Nick said with sincere reverence in his eyes as Julian ordered them both beers.
“It’s no problem, my love. Anything for you, dear.”
He was almost joking.
“Yeah, well, I just wanna let you know you’re appreciated, or whatever,” Nick realized too far into his sentence just how stupid he sounded.
“If you really wanted to show me how much you appreciate me, you could always suck me off.” Again, almost joking.
He would never admit how insane it drove him, the way Jules could say something that crass and it sound like he was serenading the fucking sirens. His voice drove Nick up the wall, it always has. It was the sound his mind supplied when the moon hung herself high in the sky, his hand in between his legs, voice pitched up and whining, back arched and lips bitten. Anyway.
Nick spent that night socializing, but somehow, just like every other night out with him, he ended up in a corner booth, halfway in Julian’s lap as he whispered some bad, problematic joke into Nick’s ear.
“So a priest and a rabbi are at a wedding, right? And there’s this little kid, and he drops his toy, so he bends over to pick it up. The priest says ‘Man, I wish I could screw that kid,’ and the rabbi looks at him all confused and says, ‘Out of what?’” He’s laughing before he even finishes the joke, and Nick is twisting up his face in distaste, but the smile hiding beneath his grimace wasn’t lost on Julian.
“That’s awful, Jules,” Nick locks his eyes directly onto his friend’s. Julian stares back at him like he’s weighing options in his head, like the fate of their friendship hung in the balance of his next move—maybe it did—but after maybe five seconds – perhaps a half hour – soft, addictive, beer-sour lips are on his. Julian’s hand on his waist is tightening, pulling Nick in closer.
And this is different from any other silly kiss they’d shared. Much, much different. At this point, Nick is fully in Julian’s lap, he has his hands in his hair, and they’re kissing and touching and it is the hottest thing Nick has ever experienced. Jules’ mouth seems to know no bounds as he drags his trail of kisses from the corner of Nick’s lips to his bony jawline, all the way down his throat to the junction between his neck and his shoulder, before working his way back up to his lips.
And Nick — poor Nick — is just lost in it. It takes everything inside him to pull himself off of Jules. He does it with a loud smack, a string of spit between their equally kiss-swollen lips being the only evidence anything had happened at all. That, and the mussed-up state of Jules’ hair. He ignores the way Julian chases his lips, and the downright wrong look misting over his eyes.
He chuckled awkwardly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He got up and excused himself with a lame “gotta piss”.
His heart might beat out of his chest, he thinks. Pull it the fuck together, Nick. Seriously.
When Nick finally finds himself in the safety of the gross bar restroom, he catches a glimpse of himself in the murky mirror.
He looks… kinda good like this. His hair is nothing short of unruly, his lips are bright pink, his cheeks are flushed and his jaw is glistening with Jules’ saliva. It affects him entirely too much to know Julian is the reason he looks like this. Oh, for fuck’s sake.
He’s jerked off in entirely worse places before, but he feels especially ashamed for how little it takes to finish himself off after… whatever that was. He has to take a second to get over it before he exits the stall to rinse off his hands and attempt to fix his appearance.
You can imagine his surprise when he leaves the bathroom and finds that Julian is gone, gone like he was never there. Fucking asshole. Nick literally drove him here—he really went out of his way to find a ride so he wouldn’t have to face him?
Fuck, he knew that was a bad idea. He has got to be the dumbest fucker on the planet to have thought that he was making a good decision. Whatever, fuck. He just… won’t let it happen again.
—
And to his credit, he doesn’t. Nick never sat in Jules’ lap unsupervised again. Never let their kisses be more than a peck that could easily be laughed off. It drives Julian crazy, but what can he do?
Nothing, he figures. So he does nothing. Years pass, they write more music, they go on more tours, they meet more people, and date entirely different ones. The band stays together. They never talk about it.
When he pops the big question to Juliet, she’s perfect. She’s a pretty crier, she’s cool about it, he’s happy, Julian thinks.
The wedding planning is Juliet’s lane entirely, he truly could not care less about where, when, how, whatever. He wasn’t even going to do this bachelor party thing, but somehow, Albert, Nikolai, and Jack White, of all people, talked him into it. Last night of freedom, man. You gotta celebrate it!
He really wishes he never met those guys right now.
Because, as he downs shot after shot, finishes cigarette after cigarette, it’s like he can only grow more miserable with the impending doom of his holy matrimony and what it’ll mean.
And it really is so not about Nick. It could not be further from the truth that as he is watching Nick dance like an idiot to the technopop song blasting over the club speakers with Fab and Albert somewhere nearby, Julian can feel his heart physically, painfully straining tighter through each beat.
There was absolutely nothing connecting the looming sense of dread that was darkening Jules’ figurative rain cloud to that long-haired, long-limbed, pretty-like-a-girl, guitarist.
And Julian always liked when Nick grew out his hair. Reminded him, in a very far away, dark corner of his mind, of the thought he had when he saw Juliet run up and give Nick a hug after a particularly great set in Brazil. Her face was right next to his, and had she not had to stretch up onto her tip-toes to reach him, he might’ve mistaken one for the other.
That night, he slept with her for the first time. A month later, Fab and Albert were teasing him about her endlessly. Smitten, they were. Julian never lingered on the idea that he may have only pursued her because of that fleeting thought. Probably had no truth in it, anyway.
He was all but 50 feet away from him, but Julian felt suddenly he missed Nick, agonizingly so.
Almost on cue, Jules saw Nick whisper something in Fab’s ear as he detached himself from the dancefloor, moving to approach the soon-to-be groom.
“Alright, man. It’s your night, but all you’ve been doing is sulking. Got cold feet or something?” Nick throws his arm around Julian’s shoulder, shaking him gently.
Or something, he thinks. Julian sighs, taking another swig of his beer. “Nah, man. I’m good. Just… trapped in my head,” he says, as if that’s even a little bit illuminating.
“Aren’t we all?” Nick replies, snaking his arm off of Julian to pick himself up a beer.
“Trapped in my head? I fucking hope not. It’s a lucky thing you’re pretty, Nicky.” It’s a shitty joke. He’s too drunk to really care.
“No, wish I was, though, sometimes—trapped in your head, that is,” Nick says as a throw-away, tone all blasé. Julian so desperately wishes he could ask him what he means by that.
Instead, he just hums. He turns his head to gaze at Nick. His eyes are lidded with inebriation, cheeks flushed with dancing, and a piece of his long hair is kind of in his face. Julian tries, really, really tries, to tell himself not to, but he never could help himself.
As he lays the hair back in its proper place, he can’t hear it, but he swears he sees Nick’s throat bob, as if his breath hitched in a gulp.
“What the hell, Jules?” Nick’s gaze suddenly hardens as he looks over at him. Julian’s eyebrows furrow.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, man. You know what I mean. What are you doing?” his voice almost breaks as he says it—his throat is a cobra, constricting each word before it can yank itself out.
Julian sighs, finishing the quarter-full bottle in one go before lighting a new cigarette.
When Nick realizes he isn’t going to respond, he lets out a frustrated breath through his nostrils. “Okay, then. Be an asshole. See if I give a shit.”
As Nick gets up to prove his point, a hand is on his wrist, gently stopping him. When Nick turns back to look at him, Julian is pulling him back down onto the couch. Nick thinks he knows what's coming but the thought dies as soon as he’s pulled into a bruising kiss.
There’s years in it. Years of subtle proximity, half-joking neck kisses, lingering stares, an inability to be alone in a room together for more than a minute. All of it gathers and dissolves in this very moment. They’re both vaguely aware of their mostly public setting, but the world can wait.
“Come on.” Julian’s standing before he can even get the words out, not even bothering to drag Nick along with him; he knows he’ll follow.
Julian gives the taxi driver Nick’s address. The ride isn’t even that long, less than six minutes, but it feels like it stretches across eons as the two men spend the entire duration, not a single limb touching, examining the other’s face, trying to peel back their skull as if to read what’s in their brain. Neither of them know it’s just their face, name, body, lips—but they have a good idea.
When they get to Nick’s apartment, it’s empty and dark, lit only through the living room window by the headlights of the variety of cars outside. Car horns, unintelligible yells, and other New York City sounds accompany the gentle clamor of the two men kicking off their shoes haphazardly, hardly getting them off before their lips are on one another’s again.
Stumbling into Nick’s bedroom is a clumsy endeavor, not helped by the simultaneous attempts made by Julian to get Nick’s clothes off.
Just barely, they make it into the room and fall onto the bed, Nick’s body laying atop Julian’s. For a while, they just cannot stop kissing. Nick is smothering the other man with kisses, all over his face, down his neck, and when he fusses to get his shirt off, all over his chest, too.
The sound Julian makes when the guitarist brushes his teeth over his nipple almost makes Nick freeze in his assault on his body. It’s strained, it’s high-pitched, a sexy hiccup that Nick needs to make him make again.
So he rolls the bud in between his fingers as he moves his mouth over to Julian’s other peak, laving his tongue all over the equally sensitive skin. Nick has Julian’s hand in his long hair, fingers twisting and pulling at chestnut tresses, back arching off of the mattress. It’s too much, it’s not enough, it’s warm, scalding hot, it’s fucking everything.
“Nick, Nick, wait, hold on,” Jules can hardly force out the words between his gasps. Nick sits up to look at him, concern written all over his face. His own saliva’s there, too. “Yeah?”
“Take off your fucking clothes.” The command leaves no room for disobedience, and even if it did, who’s he kidding? He would smash his fucking guitar if Julian asked.
His jacket was gone in the living room, so he just had his halfway unbuttoned dress shirt to peel off along with his jeans. Julian watched with starved eyes as Nick made a show of it, staring him down like this torture was amusing to him.
The smirk was wiped off his face quickly, though, because once Nick’s boxers were off, Julian was on him, lips on his before he could even look him over. With hands gripped on the taller man’s hips, Julian walked him back towards the bed, laying him down once the backs of his knees bumped the edge of the mattress.
He shed his last layers quickly, beyond over the teasing. Julian’s knees are on the ground so quickly he wonders if they’ll bruise tomorrow. He hopes they do.
Julian locks heavy, lidded eyes onto Nick as he kisses the tops of his thighs, followed by the soft patch of hair at the base of his painfully hard dick, and then finally, finally, he places a gentle, nearly innocent kiss to Nick’s weeping tip.
With a few drawn out whines and pleads from Nick, Julian finally decides to take pity on his friend and wrap his lips around his cock. As he flattens his tongue against the underside of Nick’s length, his tip presses against the back of his throat and holy shit.
The sensation is entirely too much for him, but that doesn’t give him the right to behave like such an outright whore.
For fuck’s sake, his back is arched almost all the way off the bed, his face is flushed, he has his tongue lolled out with incoherent moans, one hand entangled in Jules’ hair while the other is attached to an arm thrown across his face, burning with shame and pleasure.
Julian’s working hard, he almost feels sober with the focus he’s exerting in his endeavors to make Nick feel good, so good, better than he’s ever felt before. He wants this so much. He thinks he might want it more than Nick.
And his wishes are Nick’s command, because with a few more keens, a fruitless warning, and a resigned, relieved moan, warmth fills Julian’s waiting mouth. He doesn’t think to savor it as he swallows it down in one gulp.
Watching him, Nick is sure he never stood a chance. He was always going to end up here, it was just a matter of time. And fuck, he’s still hard.
Nick feels a little bad when he yanks Julian up by his hair to weld a kiss onto his lips, but the whiny moan the singer lets out at the sharp pain kills the I’m sorry in his throat.
And Nick thinks he could kiss Julian forever. The warm muscle in his mouth feels as familiar as his own, a Siamese tongue, maybe. The thought makes him smile, and Julian grins back against him.
Before returning his mouth to Nick’s again, Jules kisses Nick’s neck bruised. He rasps out “lube?”, to which Nick responds by nodding toward his bedside table.
Julian smirks to himself. Of course.
Along with the small bottle, Julian grabs a condom from the drawer and tears it open with his teeth.
Nick scoots back a little, spreads his legs a little wider and his eyes are pools of wanting and waiting. He’s the very picture of everything Julian’s ever wanted.
He can’t help but just stare at him for a second. His hair is pretty fucked up but his lips are plump with kissing, his cheeks rosey and blushing. All he needs is a little eyeliner and he’s his dream girl. Fuck, he already is.
They don’t say anything as Jules works Nick open with his fingers, not even when Nick’s teeth bite into Julian’s shoulder and his cock twitches.
Once Nick’s prayers for Julian to just fuck him already permeate to his blown-out psyche, Julian cautiously, agonizingly slowly presses into Nick.
And God, it is fucking glorious. They feel high on it. It feels nothing like the sex Julian’s had before.
He used to think sex with Juliet was the best thing he’s ever experienced, but he shamefully, distantly thinks no, this is better. Nick’s teeth are grinding down onto each other as he takes Julian’s cock so fucking well, like he was born to do it.
The scar on his collarbone that Julian noticed earlier was in clearer focus to him now, and it seems freshly healed, so maybe it hasn’t always been there, but that doesn’t matter now, not in the slightest, because Julian can’t even think twice about it before he’s laving his tongue over the length of the jagged line.
“Jules, Jules, God—fuck!” Nick squirms and tries to pull back at the sensitivity.
Julian’s not having any of that though as he wraps a strong arm around Nick’s back and pulls him closer towards him, muttering a frustrated “Don’t fucking run from me.”
Reaching between them with his free hand, Jules wraps his hand around Nick’s cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts. The sounds he’s pulling from Nick push him closer and closer to his climax, but he needs to get Nick there first. Again.
“Please, Jules, fuck, I’m so close, pleasepleaseplease,” he’s whimpering like a pornstar, a female one, at that, and Julian pouts at him, pressing a mockingly sweet kiss to his forehead.
“So fuckin’ needy, aren’t you? Moaning like a girl, so pretty, all for me, huh?”
Nick’s nodding mindlessly, rocking his hips into Julian’s while simultaneously trying to jut his pelvis up to meet Jules’ hand “Mhm, yes, yes, for you, shit, yes, fuck, all for you. Yours, I’m all fucking yours, Jules—God, fuck!” Nick babbles out, eyes rolling back, short fingernails dragging down Julian’s back as his orgasm hits him like a fucking train.
Julian isn’t far behind, a tortured groan and one final, deep thrust inside Nick is all it takes for the tight coil festering deep inside his belly to finally snap.
They spend a minute or so laying just like that, catching their breath, Julian softening inside of Nick before pulling out and discarding the condom. They get up, go to the bathroom, and put on only their underwear before getting back into bed.
Julian lights a cigarette as he leans back against the headboard, Nick under his arm, head on his chest. Julian mindlessly draws gentle swirls on the skin of Nick’s bony shoulder.
The bedside clock on Nick’s nightstand now reads 3:57 AM, which means by the time they wake up, inevitably hung over, Julian is going to be getting ready to stand at the end of an aisle, waiting to receive his bride, Nick standing next to him as one of his groomsmen (Albert called dibs on best man as soon as the engagement was announced) and they were going to have to move on.
Maybe he was being foolish, but Nick thought that there might have been a non-zero chance that Julian was going to change his mind. Maybe if he asked nicely enough, got him off again, he would call Juliet right now, break her heart, not do this to them.
But that would be silly, because then what? It’s not like he’s gonna marry Nick instead, God, even Nick doesn’t want that, but he does want him.
“What are you thinking?” Julian asks, and it almost sounds like he didn’t even want to. Like he regretted the words as soon as he said them.
Nick stays silent for a second before sighing and stealing a cigarette for himself out of Julian’s pack on the nightstand. A deep inhale of bitter smoke later, and Nick’s throat feels like barbed wire, and his eyes are pricking with water at the corners.
He swallows the ache, blinks back the stupid fucking tears, and shakes his head as best as he can.
“You’re getting married.” Nick states, but he means it as a question. Just to make sure. He holds his breath as he waits for Julian’s answer.
“I’m getting married.”
Nick stays deathly still. He takes a second hit of his cigarette before putting it out, pulling himself out of Julian’s grasp, and turning around to have his back to him. He doesn’t have anything to say as he shuts his eyes and tries to fall asleep.
Julian leaves a half-hour later. Nick doesn’t sleep a wink that night. He stays up, watching the sunrise on his couch through the window. He throws up twice throughout the night.
And by God, six hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Julian Casablancas are pronounced husband and wife.
Years pass, they write more music, they go on more tours, they meet more people, and the band stays together. And after starting their own bands and families and legacies, there’s nothing left to do. Nothing left to talk about.
That’s what they tell themselves at least, to justify them never talking about it. They almost do, on multiple occasions, but by funny, karmic, fate, something always makes them put a pin in the conversation before it even starts. They both think the other person is doing it on purpose.
It’s hell, but they’ve been here before. An inability to be alone in a room together for more than a minute. Lingering stares. Subtle proximity. It’s all too familiar, except this time there are gold shackles around their left hand’s ring finger, and the half-joking neck kisses aren’t so easy to be laughed off anymore.
But there’s nothing to be done about it, Julian figures. Nick figures the same.
So they do nothing. And they never talk about it.