Some people have best friends, some people have lovers. Some people have family. I have Julien. Instead of trying to put a label to our relationship, I just consider him the most important person in my world.

It started after Julien had saved my life. Middle school, eighth grade – I was thirteen, he was fourteen. I was standing on the roof of the arts building on the campus, looking down at the three story drop with a passive face. It wasn’t much, but I knew if I landed on my head, the concrete would splatter my brains.

Classes had just started, and no one was around, all the good little students inside their classrooms. Except I spotted a little straggler with bright blond hair, and he spotted me, too. We knew each other from geometry class. And he screamed up at me in his loud, piercing voice, “Hey, man! Wanna come grab breakfast with me?”

At first, I had no idea what he said. I was three stories up, and even Julien’s obnoxious voice couldn’t carry all the way up. But I couldn’t stand the thought of dying without knowing what the hell he said. Knowing Julien, it could have been anything from, “you still owe me that purple pen you borrowed” to “hey would you mind blowing me before you off yourself?”

So I just stood and stared for a while, to make sure it wouldn’t suddenly click together in my head, and when it didn’t, I blankly turned around and went back down the stairwell I busted into.

When I got back down to the ground (which took a considerable amount of time), Julien was sitting on a bench in the quad. His face lit up when he saw me, and I quietly asked, “What?”

He just laughed, and laughed. I didn’t get it at all. He said, “Let’s get breakfast, okay? I’m starving, man, and I sure as hell don’t want to be in geometry right now.”

So we left the school entirely, I got to experience Julien’s sneaking-past-supervisors abilities personally, and we went down the street to get breakfast. And that was that.

I owe Julien my life. I haven’t really changed much in the four years since then, personality-wise. I’m still the same old bland Meine. But now I appreciate every moment that I’m alive. And with every moment, I have vowed to protect Julien’s life.

With Julien’s crazy lifestyle, it’s basically a 24/7 job, too.

“Mein-eh,” Julien now whines, adding emphasis on the usually subtle syllable at the end. He flops around on my bed as I look at him from my seat at my desk, trying to work on my German paper.

“You know what I wanna do?” he continues, staring at me through his wispy blond fringe.

I raise my eyebrows a little to prompt him.

“I wanna quit smoking!” he announces happily, rolling around some more.

“Good,” I reply, turning back to my paper. It really is good – by smoking, he means smoking pot, so this new development in The Life of Julien relieves a little stress for me. “You should quit drinking, too.”

“Oh, man,” he splays himself on his stomach. “You know I can’t do that. At least not ‘til I get used to this.”

Sighing, I make that scrunched ‘yeah, okay, but I’m not really happy about it’ face and scribble down a few lines in German.

There’s a moment of silence, before, “You’ll help me, right?”

“Of course,” I say firmly.

“And I mean, no matter what I say later. I really wanna quit, you know?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I get back to my work, and Julien flips open some sort of hand held game, still lying on his stomach. Usually weekdays are laid back like this, and since it’s only Monday, Julien’s still tuckered out from the weekend. Sometimes we’ll go out on the weekday if there’s something promising to be ‘really sick’, as Julien puts it. But it’s those weekends that get pretty crazy. Julien and I are very close, I would say that I’m the closest person to him, but he has all of his…party friends. And oh, how they party.

Once I’m finished conjugating endless verb tenses in German, I place all of my papers back into my school bag, before joining Julien on the bed. He ignores me and keeps viciously tearing apart monsters in his game. I prop my head up with my hand, elbow jutting into the pillow, and watch him silently.

--

“Remember, no smoking,” I say quietly into his ear as we walk up to the house booming with music from inside.

“Yeah, I know,” he says with mock exasperation.

“I’ll always be right here,” I add. He looks up at me and smiles genuinely.

Julien goes through what I call people-cravings. Nearly all the time, Julien has a single person that he is completely obsessed with and wants to be with as much as possible. Right now this person is Frank Matthews, and he’s the one hosting the party we’re about to submerge ourselves into.

The moment we’re inside, Julien’s eyes scan the room for any sign of Frank. He lights up once he sees him, and makes a gesture to me to tell me where he’s going before heading off. Now my part is to stand around awkwardly and look as though I’m even remotely at this party for myself.

Sometimes people approach me as I drift around, keeping my eyes on Julien the whole time. When I first did these things for Julien, I would just think, how in the hell could someone possibly want to talk to me? but now I just grin and bear it. I humor them for a while, but never let it get past mind numbing conversation. After a while, they realize how deeply and genuinely boring I am, and move on.

After a few hours, I’ve moved into the Musical Chairs Stage, in which I get tired of standing around, and take to sitting, though I move my seat every so often. I don’t care if someone sees me in one spot the whole night, but I knew I’d never hear the end of it from Julien if it somehow put a damper on his social reputation; hanging out with the stationary ghost.

The next time my eyes flick back over to Julien, things have become heated between him and Frank. I sigh, and look back down at my hands in my lap. We’ve already agreed that Julien making out with anyone is okay; I don’t really care if he gets mono or something, that’s his problem. But we have a different agreement for anything beyond that, one I’m sure I’ll be living up to if Julien keeps at it for much longer.

Whether I’m sitting here supervising Julien, or back in a quiet, comfortable place alone with Julien, time passes just the same, and the minutes dwindle away, revealing later hours into the night. It might sound excruciatingly boring, sitting here doing nothing, but…somehow it isn’t, knowing that my very presence here is keeping Julien away from self-destruction. I would do anything for Julien…the thought that there are a million more productive things I could be doing hardly crosses my mind.

I get up from my seat at a couch near to Julien, and make my way to the kitchen table. The whole downstairs living areas are very open, so being in the kitchen isn’t really like being in a separate room from Julien, and I can still see him from here. He’s so beautiful…even seeing him with another person, it doesn’t bother me. Julien is in his element. His happiness is my own.

By the end of the night, Julien is pretty drunk, but he didn’t get near pot the entire night. He’s pretty worked up from Frank, and here’s where our agreement comes into play. I take him back to my place, down to my room in the basement, where no sound gets up to my parents on the second floor above us, and I do anything he tells me to.

Going along with his whole partying lifestyle, Julien has a very active and near insatiable…libido. Luckily, when I met him, he had never had any sexual exploits with anyone before, and I was able to prevent him. Then…I’m not sure how it was brought up in the first place, but I ended up offering myself to him if ever he really…felt the need. And now we have an ongoing thing – he gets his jollies with his people-cravings, and I do the rest, so he gets what he wants without the gross STDs.

So when he tells me to, I slowly undress him, feather kisses all along his body, gently move in sync with him. I’m glad when he’s in a calm, romantic-ish mood, because I’m not very good at playing the rough fuck kind of guy. But when he’s in the mood for that, that’s what I give him regardless.

“F—Frank,” Julien whispers against my skin in the dark. I don’t think he’s ever said my own name during his, ah, fits of passion, and it’s probably why I don’t really think of Julien and I as having a sexual relationship. It’s kind of just a favor…he’s not really having sex with me.

Once he’s through, we lie back together, and I pull him against me. He snuggles up contentedly, and falls asleep quickly as I lightly stroke his hair.

--

Julien and I go to a few more of Frank’s parties over the next couple of weeks. We repeat the same routine every night. Only a few times did I have to keep him from being tempted by pot. He seems like he’s really going to keep this one up.

One night we get home and stumble down to the basement, like any other night. It’s a Friday, so we stayed out longer than normal. Right now, I can hardly keep my eyes open. But I still do as Julien tells me.

He tells me to sit at the bed and I do. He moves closer slowly, an unreadable expression on his face, before he climbs up and straddles my lap, facing me. His face is extremely close to me, but he’s not looking at me; instead, looking down, his mouth slightly open, and I can feel his breath on my neck.

I’m about to start doing something, but he suddenly slides his hands up my chest, underneath the shirt, and it’s a strange sensation. Usually, he barely touches me on his own. I’d never really noticed; I guess I was just wrapped up in doing everything for Julien. But now it’s made apparent, while I sit there dumbly, his hands flying everywhere, his mouth beginning to work on my collarbone.

“Meine.”

It comes out in a harsh breath against my shoulder, and I’m sure I’ve heard him wrong.

“Meine,” across my check.

“Meine,” into my ear.

His lips start to form another M and I can’t take it. I grab him tightly, my hands digging into either set of ribs, and I plop him next to me on the bed, like he’s a ragdoll. I stand up and face him, but I bow my head; I can’t possibly look him in the eye.

“I’m sorry, but I think I’m about to be violently ill,” I tell him, the first thing that comes to mind, and he just falls back and laughs, laughs it right up.

I swiftly hop up the stairs two at a time and head into the living room, sitting down on the couch. I take a few deep breaths, rubbing my face hard with the heels of my palms. I guess I’d never noticed it, with the way that Julien’s always kind of in his own little world, but…there’s a chance that…I mean, I might…

I think I might be in love with Julien.

--

The next morning, I wake up sore, with my chest aching. I hear noises in the kitchen; it’s gotta be mom, and I quietly slip into the basement, feeling really guilty. I shouldn’t have left Julien all alone in his state after…a crazy party.

Luckily when I get down there he’s not dead or rolling around in his own puke or something. He’s sleeping like the little angel he is, all sprawled out on my bed, his chest softly moving up and down. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle him now, knowing my…feelings for him. I take a deep breath and sit down next to him, lightly tugging my fingers through his sleep-tousled hair. His hand moves to the bottom of my shirt and his fingers curl, weakly grasping the material. He mumbles something that could either be my name, or “mine”. Neither option does anything to help my anxiety.

I sit staring off into space for a while before I hear a clear, “hey”. I turn back to Julien and he’s looking up at me with his huge, bright eyes.

“Good morning,” I say quietly, giving him a small smile.

There are two possibilities here; either I tell him how I feel, short and simple. Or, I keep it all locked away forever and ever. I don’t forget that my sole purpose in life is to please Julien, and if he doesn’t return my feelings (which I don’t think would ever, ever happen), then confessing to him would be useless and just muck everything up.

He returns the smile in full force. I sigh, and scoot onto the bed more, so I can pull his back to my chest and snuggle shamelessly as I rock him back and forth.

“You’re in a good mood today,” he says in almost a whisper, as if for some reason we have to keep quiet right now.

“Yeah,” I breathe back, keeping with the quiet theme. “I’m just grateful I have you.”

“You’re grateful?” Julien chuckles. “I’d be dead by now if it weren’t for you.”

“Well, me too.”

Julien doesn’t reply, just lays his hands on top of my arms around him. We sit like that for a while before we finally get our lazy asses up and out of bed.

--

A few days pass by, and we actually don’t see much of each other. He says he has to work on some project and goes over to his partner’s house a lot. Most of our interaction over Monday to Wednesday consisted of me telling him over the phone to be a good boy and remember all his promises to me.

On Thursday, he comes over and says he just wants to sleep over, doesn’t want to go anywhere tonight. We hang out in my room in the basement mostly, me doing homework and trying to convince him to do his, and just generally hanging out.

Once it starts to get late, and my parents are nice and tucked away in bed, Julien approaches me where I sit at my desk. He stands awkwardly, looking down at his hands as he wrings them together. “Can I ask you something…stupid?”

“Sure, hon,” I reply, giving him my full attention.

“Could we…do it…you know, just with each other? Like Julien and Meine…not Frank, or Matt or anyone that you think of or anything. Just…me and you.”

“I’ve only ever thought of you,” I say, mostly because I feel like he should know. He smiles gently, and I take one of his hands in my own.

And how could I say no? I’ve always complied with every little thing he’s wished before. Why would I stop now?

This time is slow and gentle. And I think it’s the most satisfying it’s ever been for either of us. He says my name over and over, and for the first time, I find my own voice to say his.

When it’s over, I can’t help myself. I hold him close and stroke his hair like always, but this time I slip out a tiny and almost nonexistent, “I love you.”

He squeezes me tight, almost suffocating me, and whispers, “Thank God.”