You are not jealous of Joey. You stand far back when the crowd swallows him & the other guys, you watch his big smile go slack with bewilderment, you pass out in your bunk at 4 in the morning while he & Lance are still rehearsing steps in the outer room; and you aren't jealous at all. You understand you're a professional brother, a hanger-on, and that stings a little bit, but-- you waited tables for 5 years and it sucked, and you & Joey are close, so, whatever. You help him feel normal, like a normal guy with a worthless slacker brother, and that's cool. You're cool with it. You aren't jealous of him.
It's just that you hadn't ever seen anything like that before.
It was a week after the tour started, only a little minute after Joey'd fucked his leg up. It was 2 in the morning and you were already in bed, and so were Joey & Lance, because it takes days to remember that there are other things to do on a bus besides lay around. You were blinking sleepily-- far from sleeping-- thru the dim light of your bunk, when the bus rocked beneath you, pulling to the side of the road. The doors opened and some voice said something questioning in the outer room, and then in the hallway.
There was a rustle of cloth, a curtain being pushed aside, and then you heard Joey's voice, hushed but wakeful, saying, "JC?"
Then JC's voice saying, "Hey. How you feeling?"
"I'm good, man. What're you doin'?"
"I brought you some of that stuff."
Joey laughed a little, quietly, you could only barely hear it thru the curtain. He said, "JC--"
"How's your leg?"
"It's fine, JC. I don't need--"
"Let me look at it."
"You're not,"
Lance said something, then, some nothing, he really was asleep, and Joey cut off. JC said again, quieter,
"Let me look at it."
And you guess he did because there were more cloth noises, and JC made a low sympathetic sound, and he said, "come here."
Joey said, "JC--" again. and JC said, "Joey," and you should've known from the way he said it that it wasn't any of your business, wasn't anything you'd know about. You heard indistinctly Joey getting out of bed, his stiff steps to the main room & JC following him.
You pushed your curtain aside after a little second & slipped into the hallway. You heard Joey chuckle and say, "I'm not gonna hafta go to Confession over this, am I?" and you froze in your tracks-- but JC laughed quietly & said, "Good grief, Joe; it's, like, chamomile and aloe and stuff. I didn't sacrifice a virgin or anything."
"No virgins?"
"No virgins."
"I only agreed to this because I thought there'd be virgins."
You leaned against the narrow hallway wall so that your vision slanted unobtrusively into the room. Joey was sitting on the couch, leaned against the armrest, JC was sitting on the floor in front of him, and they were caddy-cornered so you could see them in perfect profile, the wall light shone down on them. JC's legs were folded under him & he had Joey's bare wounded leg in his lep. There was a bowl beside him.
JC grinned down at whatever he was doing, at his hands on Joey's leg, and said, "You didn't really agree to this."
Joey said, "oh, yeah. Then why--" And then he flinched and JC yelped. "Sorry," grimaced JC. One of his hands came up to Joey's thigh, petting soothingly. "Sorry."
The smell came from whatever was in the bowl that JC was laving gingerly around the purpled splotch on Joey's leg, and it was, you're not sure, nice, not like medicine. It smelled warm, and good like dryer sheets and kind of weird like wet dirt. JC and Joey stopped talking; and JC dipped his fingers into the bowl again & again until Joey's leg was smeared reddish-brown from knee to ankle.
Then JC said, "hang on--" and he lifted Joey's leg, slid out from underneath it, set it down. He went over to the kitchen area, pulled a dish towel from one of the drawers-- ran the tap till the water got warm then ran the cloth and bowl thru that. He came back and slipped beneath Joey's leg again, and Joey still didn't say anything.
JC pulled the cloth from the bowl, squeezed ropes of water from it, shook off the excess-- and then pushed it gently against the brown of Joey's leg. Joey made a face, and JC smiled up at him & said, "shh."
He cleaned Joey's leg off and then took the rag & bowl back to the kitchen, and then came back. He sat down again, recupped the leg in his lap-- Joey's leg was shiny and pink with the hot water now, and JC leaned in until his forehead was touching Joey's knee. Joey's eyes were open, they were on JC, his hands were resting in his own lap, his breathing was slow and even.
You stepped farther forward, pressed your cheek harder against the wall. Then you saw that JC's eyes were closed and you realized he was praying.
This wasn't, you're not. You hadn't ever seen anything like that.
You pulled back into the hallway, back toward the bunks, and you were climbing back into bed when Lance's curtain swished aside. He blinked up at you.
"Steve. What's goin' on?"
You didn't know, you felt jumpy, like an intruder, like somebody who didn't know anything about anything. You pointed back at the outer room and said, "JC" and then you were in your bunk with the curtain pulled.
You heard Lance get up and walk out there & him saying, "so he talked you into the eye of newt, huh?" and JC's small delighted laugh.