Work Text:
When Roz’s voice wakes him up, Cliff tries to block out the noise and go back to sleep. It doesn’t work.
"It’ll be five weeks before we see each other again. Five weeks. Do you really want to waste time over something so stupid?”
Cliff rubs at his eye. His arm feels heavy, but there’s no pounding in his head. He must still be drunk.
Someone else answers. “It’s not stupid.”
“I apologized to her like you asked, okay? She thought it was funny.” Roz laughs, then. He sounds slightly manic. “She told we could visit her on set, she’s not upset with me for asking.”
“Well, I am. Upset.”
The voices are coming from around the corner, past the tiny kitchenette. Cliff props himself up on an elbow. The hotel bed creaks under him. When he looks down at himself, he realizes hasn’t changed out of his club clothes. He wasn’t even underneath the covers, just crawled on top and passed out like an old man. The smell of sweat and cigarettes is stuffing up his head.
“Then let’s go to yours and you can be mad there, malysh—”
“Don’t call me that right now.” Something about the tone sets off alarm bells in Cliff’s head. Where has he heard this person before? The voice gets a little louder, a little angrier. “I left the table for five minutes.”
”Yes, and in five minutes she gave me an actual answer, not—”
“You asked her about our sex life in public. What the fuck were you thinking, Rozanov?”
That last word clicks it into place in Cliff’s mind. He knows that voice.
He’s up off the bed before he can even realize what he’s doing. His heads spins for a moment, tipping the room sideways. Too fast. His pulse pounds in his ears and he misses what’s said next.
When Cliff rounds into the entryway, he stops short. Roz whips his head around and locks eyes with him.
Fuck, Cliff was right.
Shane Hollander is standing at the door, looking ready to throw a punch. Roz has a hand on Hollander’s shoulder, holding him back.
Cliff thinks, Wow. Roz finally pissed off Hollander bad enough it left the rink.
Hollander catches Cliff’s gaze for a split-second before glaring at Roz. “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”
“He was asleep,” Roz says immediately. “We’re fine, Marley, go.” Aside from the angry flush on his face, his pronunciation is losing its definition, all the words running into each other. He looks like he’s about to do something really stupid. His thumb digs into the meat of Hollander’s deltoid, indenting the fabric of his jacket.
Great. Drunk and mad are a historically amazing combination of things for Roz to be.
Cliff has pulled Roz away from fights before. He’s helped Roz ends fights before, on the rare time he’s bitten off more than he can chew. Cliff knows that if Hollander swings at either of them now, it’s going to get messy. Sober or not, Hollander is still losing the numbers game. He looks fit to be tied, though, and Cliff can’t remember ever seeing Hollander angry off the ice. His fists are balled at his sides.
That makes him nervous.
Cliff nods to where Roz is more or less squeezing the life out of Hollander’s shoulder. “You sure everything’s okay?”
Hollander asks, “How much did you hear?” at the same time Roz snaps, “I told you to leave.”
Hockey players are stupid. It’s a stereotype, but more often than not, it’s true. Cliff has taken enough hits to the head his sister has gone from joking about CTE to talking to their mother about brain scans in hushed tones, like he can’t hear them from the couch. He’s gotten really good at admitting when he doesn’t know something, because he’s learned the hard way that pretending to understand only puts him further behind.
Cliff has no fucking idea what’s going on right now. He thought he did, for a brief moment, but he’s clearly missing a chunk of the picture. So, he doesn’t try and play it off like he’s up to speed.
He glances between them. Roz looks ready to kill him. Hollander looks ready to kill himself.
“What the fuck, you guys?” Cliff asks.
“Marleau,” Hollander says, low and steady, and that’s something. He can’t remember Hollander ever saying his name like that. He’s sure he would’ve remembered. “What did you hear?”
Cliff blinks and tries to think back a total of thirty seconds. God, he shouldn’t have kept taking shots after Connors left. He feels like someone’s replaced his frontal lobe with cotton balls. The alcohol and minor-not-technically-a-concussion he got a week ago are not mixing well. He holds out a hand and feels immediately stupid. What, is he trying to calm a horse?
“Look,” Cliff says slowly, “whatever is going on between you two—”
Hollander cuts him off with a groan, covering his face. “Fuck, are you kidding me?”
“Marley,” Roz says. His voice is dangerous. “Go to the beds. Give us a minute to talk, then Hollander and I will explain.” Roz still hasn’t moved his hand off Hollander’s arm.
If the words, Huddle up, are said within earshot, Cliff perks up like a dog hearing, Walk. When the social media team tells him answer a bunch of inane would-you-rather’s, he does it. Last night after they lost the game, Roz snapped at him to get dressed because they were going out, Marley, I want to get drunk, so Cliff got up off his bed and opened his suitcase.
He knows how to follow orders. When he was in college, failing half his classes and putting so much into hockey his friends put him through a mock-intervention that just pissed him off, his uncle made more than one comment about Cliff going the military route if ‘this hockey thing’ didn’t work out. Cliff hated the fact that, waiting to see if he’d make it into the draft, he considered it.
But it had worked out, and he went to Boston. He’s been a Raider for years and he never wants to fucking trade. Roz is his Captain. Cliff listens to his Captain.
He backs away a step, then turns around and walks back into the bedroom area. His instructors are usually clear. At least Cliff can give Roz that: Bossy even while plastered.
Cliff sits on the bed. The smell of smoke is stronger in here. Great, he can’t wait to get bitched at and sent a $200 fee. Drunk cigarettes shouldn’t count.
No, Cliff’s brain supplies, Roz and I should’ve just opened the damn window.
Less than a minute passes before Roz and Hollander follow him. The mattress dips beneath Roz’s weight as he sits on the opposite bed. Instead of standing like Cliff expects him to, Hollander joins Roz, leaving less than an arms-length of distance between them.
Cliff frowns. If Hollander lunges for Roz, he’ll probably get a good grip before Cliff can intervene. It’s not ideal.
Yet, there’s something almost funny about seeing them side by side. Roz slouches like a kid pulled into the principle’s office. Hollander sits with his shoulders back, spring-loaded. Roz, like Cliff, is still in his rumpled club clothes, looking for all the world like he could tip over and be asleep before his head hit the pillow. Hollander seems just as sober and awake as he did during the game earlier. He’s in gym clothes and his hair is damp.
“So,” Cliff says.
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Hollander says. He sounds the same he does in interviews. Buttoned-up and ready to give the same four answers over and over.
Roz rolls his eyes. “Yes, Hollander, Marley is so upset. He has never heard of sex before.”
Hollander ignores him. “We were talking about yesterday, before the game. He and I had dinner with a friend. Rose.” Then, like Cliff could somehow be a man with eyes and not know who he’s talking about, Hollander adds, “Rose Landry.”
Cliff clears his throat. “You guys dated for a couple months, right?”
“Weeks,” Roz interjects, bitchy.
“Rozanov,” Hollander says.
And isn’t it so interesting that Roz shuts up? Completely. Cliff is pretty sure he can hear the click of his teeth from how fast he closes his mouth. They must be even closer than he thought. Whenever Cliff tells Roz to shut up it just makes him bark louder.
The dots connect in Cliff’s mind.
Hollander. Roz. Rose Landry. Sex life. She said we could visit on set. I apologized to her like you asked.
Like you asked.
It makes sense, in a weird way. Hollander’s fear of being found out. Roz and Hollander’s sudden closeness these past few months, charity notwithstanding. Even the most outrageous part—the fact that Hollander of all people is involved—can be explained by him being the middleman, the unlikely bridge between world-class hockey players and award-winning actresses.
Cliff tries to keep it light. Apparently not all of the connections between his brain cells have been knocked loose, because he knows what’s going on. Clearly, Hollander doesn’t like that Cliff knows for whatever reason, but that’s fine, who cares. Even if it isn’t fine, Hollander’s not about to bash his skull into the headboard in an attempt to induce amnesia. He and Roz were arguing about whatever they were arguing about, and they’re obviously close enough to sort that shit out on their own. Cliff just needs to say, it’s okay, I understand, we can drop this conversation and never pick it back up again.
What he ends up saying is, “If this is supposed to be a humble brag where you tell me you and Roz had a threesome with Rose Landry, you can keep the details to yourself.”
That’s a lie. Cliff really fucking wants to hear about it. He wants a recreation in this hotel room, right now, with a sound team and professional camera crew.
“Shut up, Marleau,” Roz snaps. Marleau. Oh, he was mad.
Cliff almost laughs, because that’s better confirmation than if Roz just came out and said, Yeah, Hollander got his dick sucked by a movie star while I fucked her from behind.
Hollander’s face is neutral. “What?”
“Hey, man, I’m not judging,” and Cliff does laugh, then. It forces itself out of his chest like a cough, a little more nervous than he wants. He’s really not judging. Far from it. He’s going to get hard if they keep talking about it, which is a problem all on its own. “Roz and I used to two-man girls, too.”
It's a Raiders’ right of passage to have Roz steal your girl at the club. No one tells rookies this, of course. It’s much more fun to watch the process unfold naturally.
Like watching one of those Planet Earth documentaries, Connors once said.
Simons pulled his freakishly good narrator voice out. Observe, a young winger lion scans the landscape of the Serengeti for prey. Little does he know, lurking in the shadows is the elusive Russian cougar, ready to steal the kill right out from under his broken nose.
It’s easy to joke about, especially since it’s happened to every one of them, also because Roz is always such a bro about it. Hell, half the time he doesn't even do it on purpose. He really is just that good. Ladies love him. He gives fucking terrible relationship advice, though, so Cliff has him beat in that department.
Cliff has a unique work around for this problem. An evolutionary adaptation, to stick with the nature theme. As far as he knows, Cliff is the only guy on the team Roz has threeways with. It works out about half the time, but when it works, it fucking works. The first time he and Roz had a threesome, the girl Cliff was dancing with suggested it. Cliff wanted to, obviously, but he was a little taken aback when Roz agreed. He shouldn’t have been—it’s Roz. Cliff could wake up to a 'got married in Vegas, want to meet her before we annul?‘ text and be only mildly surprised.
Roz surprises him now. He says, “Shane doesn’t want to hear about that, Marleau,” with enough acid in his voice to corrode metal.
“I think I do,” Hollander says shortly. “Girls. You did it more than once?”
Cliff swallows nothing. He looks between them. For the first time since he sat, he feels truly unsure.
Hollander wouldn’t tell anyone, would he? It would be bad for him, too. He has to see that. Hell, it would look worse for him than anyone else, considering the public image he’s spent the last ten years curating. Roz could easily spin this like Hollander had gotten cucked by his rival. Rose Landry being his ex-girlfriend would only add fuel to that fire.
Then there’s the whole… Hollander of it all. From what Cliff’s heard, he not a talkative guy. He doesn’t date publicly, with one huge, Rose Landry shaped exception. A few of the guys on the team think he’s gay past the normal, what a cocksucker, locker room throwaways, like, truly, actually gay.
Obviously not gay enough to pass up on Rose Landry, but still. It would be bad for that to get out. Scott Hunter has not been having an easy time with it.
Cliff drags his eyes up Hollander’s body. He’s wound tight, every muscle stiff. Only one thought is crossing Cliff’s mind.
Hollander looks like the kind of guy who could keep a secret.
Cliff is pretty confident in his assessment, but Roz is still trying to burn a hole in the side of his head with his glare. It’s clear Cliff has gone too long without answering. Hollander gets a weird look on his face, like he wants to frown but can’t.
“Forget it,” Hollander says. “That’s between you two.”
“No. No, Shane, is okay,” Roz tries, and fuck, Roz is really gone. Cliff hasn’t heard him slur his English like that in years. They way Roz is sitting, he’s turned towards Hollander, knee up on the bed. Roz’s whole body is angled towards him. Hollander doesn’t even bother to look at him. “You want to hear about me and Marley? I tell you. I don’t hide anything. You ask me, I tell you.”
For some reason, that doesn’t seem to be the answer Hollander wants.
“That doesn’t count,” Hollander says. “You’d tell anyone.”
“No, not anyone. Just ask Marley. We were careful.” Roz is leaning in towards Hollander but not touching him, magnetized, hand resting on the bedspread inches away from Hollander’s thigh.
Cliff has seen a lot of legs. He’s been in locker rooms his whole life. He’s slept with dozens of women, dated a literal model, and watched probably a little too much porn.
He can’t stop looking at the way Hollander’s shorts are riding up on his thighs.
Hollander doesn’t ask him anything. He’s not even making eye contact with Cliff. His expression is expectant. His eyes are… watery? Is the light playing tricks?
“Yeah,” Cliff manages to say. “I don’t usually… Ever, actually.”
“So well-spoken,” Roz snarks.
Hollander goes stone-faced. “Shut up, Rozanov.”
Again. All Quiet on the Russian Front. He’s inching closer to Hollander, shifting against the sheets, but still not touching him. Hollander is acting for all the world like Roz is not in the room with them. His posture has gotten impossibly stiffer.
Cliff is starting to think he might’ve missed a part of the puzzle.
“You kept it quiet?” Hollander asks. His voice is pitched low, maybe a little wary.
He's doing that thing girls sometimes do. The shy thing, where he's not really looking in Cliff’s eyes, but more at his nose, or maybe his mouth. Roz, on the other hand, is acting like his eyes are glued to the side of Hollander face.
“Yeah,” Cliff says. “I kept it quiet.”
Roz is half-hard. Cliff can see the outline of his dick through his pants. He can’t tell if Hollander is, but with the way his arm sits, half-covering his crotch at an awkward angle, he might as well be.
Cliff can feel his own cock stiffening. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s just red-blooded.
“Marleau,” Hollander says. “Can I ask you something?”
Cliff’s mouth is dry. When he swallows, it’s almost painful. “Yeah. Yes.”
Hollander’s mouth twitches. “When you did… that. With Rozanov. Did you ever just watch?”
Roz makes a sound like a kicked dog. His hips jerk forward and bump into Hollander’s leg, and finally, finally, Hollander acknowledges him by wrapping a hand around the back of Roz’s neck and holding him there. Roz seems to take this as permission, because he stays right up on Hollander’s side, rubbing his clothed dick against Hollander’s thigh in small, uncontrolled thrusts.
(And underneath everything, below the fog that’s settled over his mind and made him think this isn’t a terrible, dogshit, career-ending situation, Cliff is charmed. Hollander didn’t say threeway or threesome or two-man or whatever fucking word would get the idea across. He couldn’t say it at all.)
Hollander says, “Marleau?”
Cliff drags his eyes away from Roz’s hips. Hollander is waiting for an answer. He asked Cliff a question. Fuck, what did he ask him?
“Once,” Cliff manages. His dick is chafing against the inside of his jeans. He wants to take them off. He wants Hollander to take them off for him. “Yeah.”
The time Cliff played observer was the best, maybe. The girl looked like an underwear model, blonde hair and tits so big Roz hadn’t been able to fit them in his hand. Her moans were hot enough she could’ve done porn or ran a chat line or whatever. Cliff came so hard he couldn’t clean all of it up out of the carpet. Afterward, though, Roz said he didn’t want to do it again. Maybe she gave him bad head. Cliff didn’t press for an answer. He knew that wasn’t how they worked.
Right now, Roz is looking like he wants to do it again. He moves his knee to hook over Hollander's thigh, spreading his legs apart and hiking up Hollander's shorts even more. He presses his mouth to Hollander's hair, whispering so softly Cliff can’t tell if he’s speaking English or Russian. Cliff sees his tongue dart out and lick the shell of Hollander’s ear. Hollander’s hand tightens on the back of Roz’s neck.
Cliff knows plenty of guys who have (either sober or very, very drunk) named Hollander the most fuckable guy they’ve ever played against. Maybe that’s the reason he’s kept it so under wraps. Hollander is basically half the NHL's “if I had to pick a guy.” Cliff understands them. Besides being a total menace on the ice—he’s fucking fun to play against even if he drives Cliff crazy—Hollander’s just so damn good looking. There’s a reason he’s the face of everything from sports drinks to Rolex. Hollander has that kind of fuck-me mouth that would get him into trouble if he weren’t one of the most reserved, professional people Cliff had ever met.
Shane Hollander is not acting very professional right now.
Roz is fucking humping his leg and making weak, breathy noises, muttering into the side of Hollander's face. Roz's hand is starting to rub the inside of Hollander's thigh, his thumb just barely slipping underneath the hem of his shorts. He looks a half-step away from licking a stripe up Hollander's neck.
Hollander is taking it all like a champ. Like he's used to this. A flush has started to color his cheeks.
It feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity. A genuine, bona-fide win the Powerball type of luck. One of those chances that float in front of you, force you to reach out and grab it out of thin air at the exact right moment.
It feels like if Cliff doesn’t touch himself in the next minute his dick might fall off.
The next words Cliff says are ones he regrets for the rest of his life. He blames the alcohol. He blames the concussions. He blames the way Hollander is chewing on his bottom lip, and the way Cliff can see the fucking mattress moving back and forth from the way Roz is grinding on his massive, muscled thigh.
“Did you?” Cliff asks.
Hollander blinks. “What?”
Cliff gets harder thinking about it. Roz and Rose Landry on the bed. Hollander in a chair, dragged away from the wall so he can sit and observe with that cold, empty shark stare he always has in the penalty box. With the way Roz is acting right now, Hollander must’ve joined them eventually. Roz was always more into touching during threesomes than Cliff was. Not like it was ever bad—far from it. But if he was jerking Cliff off so he’d come on a girl’s face, Cliff wasn’t going to return the favor. He’d never touched Roz’s dick and he never planned to. It was hot to fuck a girl at the same time, Roz in her ass, Cliff in her pussy, but she would be between them, always. A buffer.
Cliff isn’t gay. But watching Roz rub his cock on Hollander’s leg, that’s not gay. It’s basically watching porn. Gay porn, sure, but who the fuck cares? It doesn’t mean anything. It’d just be hot. Just Roz and Hollander humping like teenagers already has him hard.
“Did you watch,” Cliff says. “With Roz.”
He’s so glad he stopped drinking when he did because he’s about half a beer away from saying, Did you watch Roz fuck Rose Landry, instead, but he thinks using her name is too much. He highly doubts Hollander is having other threesomes with Roz, no matter how hot he is.
Roz, weirdly, starts to laugh.
Hollander is doing his dead stare again. Cliff’s cock hurts from being trapped in his jeans, but if he takes his dick out now, he’s going to start jerking himself off, and he’ll come before anything good happens.
Hollander says, “You never fucking tell a single fucking person about this, Marleau. Nothing. Not about Rozanov, not about Rose. You don’t know we went to dinner. You don’t know Rozanov and Rose have ever spoken. I never came to this fucking hotel room. Do you understand?”
Hollander’s question demands an answer. A verbal one. Cliff can feel his heartbeat in his dick. Sweat gathers on the back of his neck. This is happening.
Cliff nods too quickly and says, “Yeah, man, I won’t say anything—”
Roz slides his hand around Hollander’s waist, still laughing. His hips have stopped moving sometime in the past minute, Cliff’s not sure when. Maybe he was going to come and wanted this to last. “He’s stupid, Shane, he doesn’t know—”
But before Roz has finished speaking, before Cliff can even process the expression on Hollander’s face, it’s over. It’s all over.
Hollander drops his hand from the back of Roz’s neck. He shoves Roz’s arm away from where it’s wrapped around his stomach. He stands. He doesn’t take his shirt off or drop his small shorts or walk over to Cliff or get on his knees to suck Roz’s dick.
“Marley,” and Roz is fucking cackling, so drunk and still visibly turned on. He folds himself halfway into the mattress, into the empty spot where Hollander was, face pressed up against the bedspread, “Marley, you’re an idiot.”
Cliff blinks hard, looking from Roz to Hollander, who is facing away from both of them.
Hollander doesn’t bother turning around. He just says, “Get up,” in a flat voice.
Then in a split-second Roz is standing next to Hollander, mouth still split into a sick grin, chest heaving like he’s trying to catch his breath.
Cliff’s mouth flaps.
Hollander walks towards the entryway, and only once he’s almost rounded the corner does it click in Cliff’s stupid hockey brain that Hollander is going to the door.
He’s leaving.
“Wait,” Cliff calls, and he’s mad, suddenly, foaming at the mouth that Hollander would bail like this, bow out at the last second like a little bitch, a cock-sucking pussy. He doesn’t stand, though, for some reason. He can't. “Fucking—Hollander!”
He almost regrets it when Hollander does wait, does turn his head to look directly into Cliff’s eyes with the exact same creepy fucking shark stare that followed him on the ice earlier that day.
“What, Marleau?”
Cliff can’t think of anything to say. There is not one word in his mind right now that would rewind this scene. He can’t even come up with a good chirp.
Hollander must know this. His eyes don’t waver.
“Keep it fucking quiet," Hollander says. He disappears around the corner.
Roz trails behind him with a hard cock and a shit-eating grin. He doesn’t even bother giving Cliff a parting glance. He just follows Hollander.
As they leave Cliff can hear Roz say, “See, Shane? See? Everyone wants to know, you can’t blame me for wanting to know! Rose thought it was funny, she told me. Let’s forget about it, baby. I know! Let’s go back to your—”
The door slams shut, cutting Roz off.
Cliff is left staring at the rumpled bed, mouth open.