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The rules, so to speak, had seemed deceivingly easy, with Ilya crowding Marleau, Connors and Carmichael against the front door before they could even step foot into the house. “No fighting,” he’d said, having marathon-watched Peaky Blinders while he recovered from a shoulder injury, as he shoved his index finger against Marleau’s chest, “no fighting,” against Carmichael’s, “no fucking fighting,” against Connors’, in an awful, and yet terrifying, combination of a brummie accent mixed with the rolling rs of his own native tongue.
The door now unlocked, they could hear Pike and Boiziau and Hollander, their lively chatter coming from the soon-to-be scene of the crime, the first—hopefully not last—get together after the end of the season. That hopefully had hung heavy and unreplied-to in their decrepit Raiders Minus One group chat two weeks prior, dripping with implications, the first of which: Or else.
Marleau, for one, was not stupid enough to forget that even a lion domesticated to purr at the feet of a man never lost its nature nor its teeth. It was 2024 and his body still remembered a particular check two years prior, when Ilya had slammed into him ten feet to Boston’s net and got the breath knocked out of him as he landed sideways onto the ice. His sin: having ghosted Ilya after he was outed. His penance: three bruised ribs and a grade-one UCL tear.
The rules today were clear, then. He wasn’t about to antagonize anyone, least of all Ilya. This is all that they would be: a handful of rivals lowering their weapons for a relaxing summer evening in Ontario. Three Raiders, two Centaurs, two Voyageurs, like the start of a bad joke. They were going to be sipping their cold drinks in Ilya and Hollander’s home, a gated residence not too far from a local sailing club and a couple of historic sites, with the early-summer sun, still pleasant rather than scorching, reflecting its last rays in the languid waters of the Ottawa river.
A perfect evening; a Canadian postcard.
Exactly the kind of boring Ilya seemingly morphed into after Hollander had somehow, in a baffling turn of events, tied down the league’s top manwhore extraordinaire into an animal of ginger ale and domesticity that enjoyed the occasional outings into nightclubs and raves the way a dog pissed on a sidewalk: before coming home with its rightful owner.
The day Ilya and Hollander were outed, Carmichael had texted him a string of ????????????? and nothing else.
Again, Marleau corrected himself. Lions. Et cetera.
In retrospect, it would be clear that Marleau’s mistakes had been plentiful. Firstly, that the finely decorated backyard was a safe space: in his defense, the rattan-effect five-seater corner sofa and the coordinated low table where Hollander kept refilling drinks, both in an innocuous light shade of cream and cocooned by a pergola in spruce timber, had an Eden-like quality to them.
He’d been fooled by Shane’s mask du-jour, too, that of a good, perfect host: We have ginger ale, as well as green tea, if you are not planning on drinking, he’d offered, conscious that Pike was supposed to drive Boizeau and himself back to Montreal; There’s beer in the fridge; Ilya’s got his vodka imported from Russia, come and tip your glass, like so. His smiles were sometimes stilted, but they were there, and Marleau himself smirked, pleased, when Hollander huffed out a laugh at his chirping. He caught Ilya grinning, too, behind the grill. The outer corners of his eyes had, sometime during their long-distance friendship, begun to crinkle. He was never going to know when.
Finally, case in point, the alcohol, high-quality and everflowing. Every salt-rimmed Corona bottle, every snap and hiss of an opened can of cider or coke, and the vodka, goddamn, the vodka: a single bottle worth more than a hundred American dollars, emphasis on American, every single on-the-rocks mellowing the air until Marleau could sit back, loose-limbed, and think, We got there: no fighting, no fighting, no fucking fighting.
Of course he’d let his guard down. The offensive had been an excess of cordiality.
By the time twilight canopied Ottawa, the air was ripe with the smell of the citronella candles carefully arranged around them and the burnt aroma of grilled meat. He sat in the corner of the sofa, line shirt unbuttoned to his mid-chest and his legs outstretched, Connors and Carmichael next to him, the latter sipping a concoction three parts vodka and one tonic, the former biting into his third sausage link; Boizeau was lying, crosslegged and shirtless, on a sun lounger; Pike was on another two-seater with Hollander (Hollander-Rozanov) as Ilya placed yet another string of sausage on the grill, careful to angle his body away from the occasional squirt of sizzling fat.
Even Boizeau slating Boston’s performance in the years following Ilya’s elopement to Ottawa couldn’t ruin his good spirit. And anyway, “Your team performance suffered a 1929-level crash in the season following Hollander’s departure,” Connors was firing back, wiping a tissue on the corner of his mouth. “Sometimes I rewatch those season’s highlights to cheer myself up. Better than a wank.”
Privately, Marleau still wondered what team in their right mind would ostracize the centre-forward Captain who had led them to three Cups. It was incomprehensible how Montreal had not been burned to smithereens by their own fans. He would never know, of course, because Ilya had signed with the Centaurs before he was outed, but he had half an idea that the Raiders’ Upper Management would have sooner knelt on a straight line and sucked Ilya’s cock themselves than bench and drop him because he liked men—which, as far as he knew, was metaphorically how the re-negotiation period had gone anyway. Fruitlessly.
Ilya had chosen Hollander. Every day, Ilya chose Hollander and this once-improbable idyll of a life in the suburbs.
And, years later, here he was himself, sipping liquid money as his former captain unlocked his phone to show Carmichael a pic of Pike’s wife and children during Halloween 2019, dressed in their father’s worst nightmare: Rozanov Boston jerseys. It was endearing; it was domestic. It was eons away from the selves of their rookie years, and, truthfully, from any image he still had, as if burnt into his eyelids, of his former captain in their golden years, when they had been close. Closer.
Marleau tipped his head back, vision blurring at the edges, and he felt this longing acutely in his chest as he eyed the cloudless sky, half-moon peeking back at him from the slats between the pergola’s ringbeams. How could he not miss it, the Rozanov captainship, all bared teeth and bloody gums, all those eighty-mile per hour shots into the opponents’ net and the buzzing, liquor-fuelled hours spent together in Boston's nightlife scene to celebrate a raging victory or mourn a humiliating loss?
Ilya Rozanov: captain, club rat, comrade, confidant, friend.
And there had been one time, when they had won the cup almost ten years ago now, these hours he kept tucked, buried beneath countless, easier memories: Marleau’s bedroom, imbued in darkness except where his bedside lamp cast gold across the sweat-gleamed, mole-tattered expanse of Ilya’s chest. Saturated with the smell of Ilya’s cologne, oakwood and aged cognac and sweat.
He opened his eyes, willing himself back into the present.
Pike’s ears were a hilarious shade of purple. “I had forgotten about that,” he was saying.
“It is normal to forget trauma,” said Ilya, plating yet another burger and offering it to Boizeau, who accepted with a nod. “Don’t worry, though, I have brand new Centaur jerseys to make up for it.”
Connors nudged Marleau’s shoulder, as if he’d just read his thoughts. “Remember when Roz was not boring?”
Fuck, yes. Marleau remembered. He recalled the sweat dripping down their necks as they danced chest-to-back with the hottest women the city had to offer, their bare, soft, glistening skin under their fingertips, and all the rounds of poker in his basement, the old apartment he’d sold years prior, and the ill-placed bets whenever they were about to play Montreal, thousands of dollars lost on hat tricks and penalties, unaware that, whatever loss or victory, Ilya had been about to recoup at home.
Ilya was finally stepping away from the grill, and Marleau tracked his movements, the familiar roll of his shoulders, left bare by a tank top, the satisfied twitch of his nose as he admired his handiwork, and found himself wondering what he’d smell nowadays, under the leftover imprint of smoked meat during gatherings such as this, and what he’d discern on a normal day instead, through the meekness of organic fabric softener.
Four months ago, Ilya had slammed into him during an overtime. He’d smelled familiar.
A week ago, he’d sent him a picture of a bottle of perfume, barely dented, this $200 head-turning mix of incense, patchouli, cinnamon and tobacco, projecting wide into a crowded room. The following text had read, This makes Shane’s nose tickle. Do you want it?
He hadn't even seen him touch a cigarette so far.
“What can I say?” Ilya was asking now. He sat next to Hollander, who let his head loll back into the nook of his neck, both forcing him and Pike to scoot over. He didn’t seem too happy about that. “Is contagious. Don’t come too close.” His arm snaked around Hollander’s shoulders.
“The night we won the Cup,” continued Connors. “We promised never to speak of it again.”
Carmichael spoke against the rim of the beer bottle. “What is there to say, even?” he asked. “I don’t remember shit. Twelve-hour blackout.”
“Same,” Ilya said, way too quickly, and no, that was a fucking lie. Marleau frowned, the aftertaste of vodka suddenly acrid in the back of his throat.
“Well, no, fuck that,” said Connors, as if reading his mind. He set his now-empty plate on the table. “My memory cuts off at you licking Dom Perignon out of a woman’s bellybutton, and then it was the next day and I was throwing everything I’d ever ingested, even the fucking baby formula from thirty years ago, and vowing to never again try to outdrink a Russian. There is no way you were that fucking gone, Roz.”
What completely and utterly fucked him over, in the end, was not any antagonism but an excess of camaraderie, because Marleau, for all that he hadn’t forgotten that a tamed lion like Ilya could still tear a limb off your body, had failed to recognise the sort of man who could tame a beast into captivity. The way Hollander had.
And so he said, “There is no way you don’t remember that spectacular trip to Paris,” almost in a rush, because there was no way Roz had forgotten. Not that of all things.
It took a second for the words to land. Then, a few things happened at the same time: Connors’ eyebrows shot to his hairline; Pike and Boizeau exchanged a glance before the latter pushed himself up on his elbows and removed his sunglasses; Carmichael set his beer onto the battlefield of balled-up tissues and dirty plates that the table had become; Ilya’s jaw slacked into surprise; Hollander’s eyebrows pinched into a frown.
The sun had almost completely dipped past the horizon line, penumbra engulfing the ends of the garden while they bathed in the dreamlike gleam of the fairy lights. Rose Landry had instructed their gardener to entwine them around the pergola’s upper frame and corner posts, or so Hollander had said. This lighting, too, reminded him of the gilded hues of candlelight catching in Ilya’s curls, a lifetime ago.
Hollander had already been looking in his direction.
Carmichael let out a loud cackle. “You dogs, that’s where you disappeared to while we dragged St-Simon home.”
Hollander’s eyebrows pinched further. He had also had a couple of drinks, which Marleau understood to be a rare occurrence. He could almost see the gears turning in his head. “You went to Paris the night you won the Cup? What were the logistics?”
“Cliff,” said Ilya.
“Come on, Roz,” said Marleau. “What was her name? Margaux? The French brunette from the club?”
“Going to Paris,” said Boizeau, helpfully—
“J.J.,” said Pike.
“Zatknis’,” said Ilya, and Marleau’s brain, even through the inebriation, translated: Shut up.
“—is an euphemism for a ménage-à-trois,” continued Boizeau, words slurring into one another. “The woman is the, huh, horizontal bar. That’s the log—uh, logistics. The men stand face to face, and the woman is between them, bent over, or on all fours, like it’s the Tour Eiffel, and they,” he stretched his arms up, bending his fingers into the imitation of a grab, “hold hands.”
“They hold hands,” repeated Hollander, slowly. His face, like the Mona Lisa, showed nothing; his eyes, however, were now darting between Ilya and Marleau.
Pike dragged a hand over his face. “Of course this is what you’re focusing on.”
“We were drunk,” said Ilya. “Very.”
“So you do remember,” said Hollander, cocking his head to the right. “Please, Marleau. Tell me more.”
“She had a rack,” started Marleau. “Spectacular tits.”
Ilya made a sound like he’d been wounded; Pike pressed his forefingers against the bridge of his nose.
“I see,” said Hollander.
“But it wasn’t just—” Marleau closed his eyes, laughter bubbling out of him. “It was the whole thing, man. We were high on the victory and everything was so vivid. I swear I could taste colors. Fucking incredible. It was the first time that—that I had a threesome and I was single after a recent break-up, I’m pretty sure, and, frankly, I don’t think I came, but it was fucking amazing anyway, bloody hell. The sounds she kept making. Fuck.”
“Maybe I should film this,” said Carmichael. He patted his thighs, as if to look for a phone in his pocket.
Hollander seemed to absorb the words. When he spoke next, there was a tentative note to it. “You didn’t come,” he said, almost a question, as if that, in itself, was incomprehensible.
“No,” said Marleau, and felt blood rush to his face. Fuck, it was hot, all of a sudden. It was impossibly hot. “I was distracted by—” he gestured towards Ilya, with another short laugh, “Alcohol. And, you know.”
Hollander wasn’t even blinking. “I don’t think I do,” and, fuck, well.
Ilya’s arm had slid off Hollander’ shoulders some time during this conversation. He reached for Hollander’s legs. “Moy lyubov,” he said. This one, Marleau didn’t know.
“Refill, anyone?” asked Pike. “Or maybe water. Shane, come, help me out here. I don’t think I can walk straight.”
He hadn’t even been drinking.
“Funny you’d phrase it like that,” said Carmichael.
“Well, fuck you too,” said Pike.
Connors’ mouth curved up. “Why, your wife not doing it for you anymore?”
Even through the daze of alcohol, it was suddenly, glaringly obvious to Marleau that this was a safe space the way a wild animal enclosure was a safe space.
Ilya snapped his fingers. “Khvatit,” he barked, the pavlovian response instantaneous, with Connors’ lips thinning into a line, effectively zipped shut, and Carmichael, sitting back, chastised, this order they had heard over and over again, on the ice, in the gym, in the locker room, at the bar, and in his own bedroom, when he’d been on the verge of coming and yet unable to, too intoxicated, too frantic, hips stuttering into a beautiful, strange woman’s cunt, one frustrated grunt after the other. Khvatit: enough. He felt it now as he’d felt it then, zipping down his spine with a jolt straight to his cock.
But, “I want to,” said Boizeau. “I’m invested.”
And Marleau said, in a rush, “I mean, nine inches are hard to miss,” gesturing at Ilya with yet another burst of laughter, this one weaker even to his own ears, just on the verge of pathetic. “It was distracting.”
Boizeau sat up even straighter. “Tabarnak,” he said, turning to his former captain. “Neuf? How the fuck do you play after?”
“Mind you,” said Pike, “he plays better,” and the vaguely nauseous tint of it knifed into the tense cut of air between Marleau and Hollander.
Despite himself, Ilya hid his face, and what Marleau recognised as a cocky grin, behind a long sip of vodka. He watched him squeeze Hollander’s left thigh once, twice, the fairy lights catching in the glint of his wedding ring.
In retrospect, he should have known. Ilya Rozanov wore all of his bad ideas on his face, in his own peculiar, intoxicating brand of honesty.
Carmichael and Connors left first, stumbling into an uber directed to the town centre; Pike dragged Boizeau to the car, laid him out on the backseat, and promised to text once they were both home. Marleau wasn’t sure of the time—his phone had died some time during the last serving of lamb chops—but it must have been close to midnight by the time the car engine revved, the summer night crisp and clear. His thoughts followed Pike’s SUV to the end of the driveway and further out, towards the suburbs of Montreal, and then he found himself wondering, for a split moment, whether Pike’s wife would be awake, waiting for him, or whether he’d come home to a quiet house of rustling beesheets and soft, even breaths.
Alcohol used to make him horny; it now made him sentimental. His own father used to sit on the porch, at the turn of autumn, and tell him and sister, beer-breath hot and sour, how he would have been a professional baseball player if he hadn’t injured his MCL in college. The memory came to him unexpected and unbidden and as if it belonged to someone else, draped in the yellowed hues of vintage photographs.
He walked back into the guest bedroom that had been set up for him, the closest to the main bedroom, both facing east. The wall-mounted TV was turned off; the ladder bookcase in the corner of the room, in rustic brown, was topped with framed photographs and a number of trinkets: he recognised two matrioskas in the likeness of Rose Landry and Svetlana Vetrova and a miniature souvenir of the Boston harbor lighthouse that Ilya used to keep tucked in his sports bag, for good luck, during his Boston years. The first thing he had bought in the city, right after his plane had landed, when he hadn’t even stepped foot out of the Logan. His first trophy: a new life in America. Or so he’d told him, offering the information like an outstretched hand during one of their first practice drills.
Sitting on the top shelf was a picture of the Raiders hoisting the Stanley Cup in 2014, taken just as Marleau planted a wet, sweaty kiss on Ilya’s cheekbone.
Ilya had shouted something in Russian then, straight at the camera. Mama was the only word Marleau had caught, just as the arena came alive around them, black and golden banners and their fans’ roaring reverbering through their bodies. Marleau had thought Ilya’s mother would have been watching at home, teary-eyed and proud somewhere in the heart of Moscow. Sometimes, on nights like this, when was bone-tired or high or tipsy and, nevertheless, always, unmoored, he’d recall the news of the Irina Foundation like a rupture, a before and after, and the reckoning: Roz had revealed himself to Hollander. This sliver of Ilya Rozanov, more important than whatever trinket he kept around for good luck, had never been meant for him first. Maybe it’d never been meant for him at all.
And, of course, years later it would have made sense why he had told Hollander. Turns out, whatever piece of himself Ilya Rozanov had doled out, whatever lazy joke, arrogant chirp, unsound advice or private memory, Hollander would have gathered a thousand more, because Hollander was always going to do one better than anyone else.
Speaking of.
His eyes moved to bed, queen-sized. It was fitted in a black set with gold inlines the shape of Japanese maples, and covered in more pillows than Marleau, or any other guest, would ever need. He thought, distantly, that those were Japanese maples in Raiders colours, and the coincidence, unexpected and maybe insignificant to anyone else, cut into him right where each previous dig had healed wrong, and lodged. The other guest bedroom had a ceiling mirror above the bed, which Roz had gestured towards with a sly, familiar smirk during their tour of the house earlier today; this one, an overhead light embellished by a halo of wooden slats. He supposed it had been courteous of them not to house him where Hollander sometimes enjoyed the thrill of watching himself being fucked open. Even more courteous not to furnish the room with a cuck chair.
He wanted a smoke. He needed some fresh air. He needed to sleep. He wanted to fuck something up. He wanted to fuck into something. He needed to get the fuck back to the living room and wish his hosts goodnight, like the good, polite Canadian boys Roz seemed to like.
He closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. After a quick trip to the ensuite, where he stared, almost transfixed, at the absolute monstrosity that was the ceramic leopard-shaped toilet brush holder there, Marleau wandered back into the living room, stepping past the photographs that hung in the corridor, a guided tour of the life Ilya had chosen: a huddle of children he recognised to be Pike’s; shots from the Irina Foundation summer camps, including one of Ilya dragging a gaggle of kids around in the winter sports attempt at a banana boat ride; a wide panoramic shot of an icy lakeside in the dead of winter; Hollander, grimacing as Anya licked his ear; Ilya and Hollander holding the Cup together, not even three months prior, after two seasons of unpolished, clumsy attempts at smothering their own egos, two planet-swallowing stars learning to orbit around each other. Victory after victory after victory, hard-fought, hard-won.
And he was going to sleep in the ghost room of Christmas past.
In the living room, the lights had been dimmed. It was cozy, admittedly. Hollander stood in the kitchen area, leaning, palms flat, against the expensive-looking countertop in white granite that he had chosen himself once he had moved in and proposed to redecorate. He had already cleaned out the littered remains of their day, the trash organised into recyclables and unsorted waste, the leftover food either sorted into tupperware and distributed to the guests. Marleau didn’t think he’d ever done any recycling, ever, in his life. He didn’t even know why he was fixating on recycling now, because he would never be a good little housewife himself.
The OLED TV screen in front of the l-shaped sofa on the other end of the room, framed by rows of shelves, each carrying photographs and DVDs and more fucking trophies, a Calder and a King Clancy and Rocket Richards, was turned on. It was replaying footage of the Raiders’ Stanley Cup win against San Francisco in 2014.
Marleau stood there, for a moment, at a loss. He angled his body towards Hollander.
Hollander had a weird look in his eyes. “You didn’t,” he started, and glanced at the panelled glass that overlooked the backyard. Marleau followed his gaze and spotted Ilya, outside. Somewhere between the goodbyes and this moment, he’d lost his tank top; his back was turned to them, and, from this angle, he seemed to be scrolling down his phone, unaware of the little seisms shaking the foundations of his home. “The night you won the cup,” Hollander continued, stilted.
Marleau said nothing. He thought, instead, How often do you bend over this counter? It felt good to think it, even if he cared too much about his teeth to voice it out loud.
“Earlier, you didn’t,” continued Hollander, despite himself, and paused. “I want to know what happened.”
I don’t want to tell you anymore, Marleau thought, because it doesn’t fucking matter. And he wondered, once again, how a man who had made ice his kingdom could look so out of place anywhere else, even in his own home. The skittish flickering of his gaze; the intonation of his words, as if each had to be plied out of his vocal chords; the twitch of his hands, the pads of his fingers tapping against granite. Hollander inhabited the ice the way he didn’t even inhabit his own body.
He asked, “Why the fuck do you want to know, Hollander?”
“I am curious,” said Hollander, plainly, “about the logistics.”
“She had two holes,” snarled Marleau, something low and dangerous pooling in his gut. “We each had a cock. We fucked her and she liked it. Loved it, even. And I loved it too, and so did your husband. It wasn’t even the first time we did it and we had a grand fucking time. Those were the logistics.”
Hollander said, softly, “But you didn’t come.”
“I did,” said Marleau, “come. After.”
During that exchange, Ilya had padded back into the house, barefoot, sliding the glass door closed behind him with a click. He clicked his phone off and slid it into the backpocket of his shorts. His expression was indecipherable. He looked at Hollander first, then at Marleau, and they were not stars or planets or satellites right now, but three men standing in a room, like the start of a good joke or the climax of a bad idea. Ilya’s skin was pebbled with goosebumps, and Marleau thought that, had he been any closer, he would have been able to see the pulse of his carotid artery beneath the soft skin of his throat.
A lifetime prior, before grey streaked his hair, before Boston lost its star player, he’d pressed his thumb against the same patch of skin just as Ilya’s Adam apple bobbed and he recited a litany of profanities and then Marleau’s name, all while a spent, content woman mouthed at the swell of his balls.
Two tumblers of vodka sat on the coffee table in front of Marleau, three ice cubes in each glass. He had already seen them, read them as an invitation. But, “One for you,” Ilya was saying now, with a small nod. “If you’d like.”
Before, and after. Fractures. Schisms. Marleau could leave now. He knew that, because Ilya was giving him a choice, and he had sobered up enough to see it, this way out of—whatever this was, this ticking bomb an afternoon and ten years in the making. He could walk out, and file this away in the same recess of memory where he had put away all the other what-ifs of his life, and it would not matter. Ilya, friend, confidant, would never hold it against him.
Instead, Marleau sat on the longest end of the sofa, because it would have been rude, he thought, to pass on this invitation, and maybe he wasn’t so unlike Hollander, after all, two good, polite Canadian boys waiting for instructions. Perhaps he could finally find out what had made it worth it for Roz to uproot his entire life for a white-picked fence in the suburbs. Never in his life had a pussy been this good.
Above all, Marleau sat because his Captain asked him to.
He reached out and took the vodka on ice, pressing the cold glass against the bare skin of his inner thigh where his shorts had ridden up. Ilya was smiling, all teeth.
“Cliff was telling me about that threesome,” said Hollander, “that you had in 2014.”
“Oh,” exhaled Ilya. “Go on, then, Cliff. Don’t let me interrupt.”
Prey, Marleau supposed, would know if it was being hunted. It lived its existence hyperaware of the rustling of a leaf or the crunch of a twig. He asked himself what sounds he should’ve been on the lookout for, and what he had been, and was still, willing to overlook. What was a hunting, if the prey was willing? It was a dance. It was a game.
So Marleau did what he knew how to do best, and played his line.
“We had fucked San Francisco,” he said. He glanced at Hollander, who was still hiding behind the barrier of the kitchen island. “And we were out, some private club downtown, and we decided we wanted to fuck some more. She was there. She was hot. She was alone at the bar, drinking—” What even had she been drinking? Marleau couldn’t remember, not really, the details fuzzy, blurred by the adrenaline of victory and the champagne and the coke he’d cut with his hotel room card and snorted in the men’s restroom. The words died in his throat.
“Nothing,” said Ilya. Without Marleau realizing, he’d walked up to the other side of the island. He tapped the knuckles of his right hand against it. “I got her something sweet as she was. A cosmopolitan.”
“What did she look like?” asked Hollander.
“She was brunette,” said Ilya. Marleau’s eyes trailed along the hard lines of his traps, past the glint of his crucifix, the swells of his pectorals, towards the trail of hair disappearing into his shorts. They landed on the thickening outline of his cock. “Pretty little thing, with freckles. Big, brown dumb eyes, begging to be made to cry.”
Hollander’s breath hitched. Marleau realized, perhaps belatedly, that this was a game in which truth was incidental.
Hollander, who both was and wasn’t himself, who was a four-time Stanley Cup winner and also a puck bunny about to get fucked both ends, grabbed a martini glass from the kitchen cabinet, bent over to pluck a bottle of cointreau and one of citrus vodka from the same liquor cart Ilya had raided throughout the day, alongside a shaker, and slowly, patiently, started to prepare a cosmopolitan.
Marleau found himself acutely aware of his own breathing, even as Hollander shook the alcohol above his head, ice rattling inside metal. Finally, Hollander opened the fridge, grabbed a lime, and cut it into four slices. He poured the mix into the glass, and garnished it.
Ilya asked, “How is it?”
“Good,” said Hollander, dumbly. It’d taken but a sip for his cheeks to pinken.
He was a bad liar in a game of play pretend. Even Marleau knew Hollander avoided refined sugars. But Ilya hummed, considering, and the next second Marleau was watching him reach across the island to grab Hollander’s chin between his thumb and index finger to pull him, roughly, towards him. He watched as Ilya licked into Hollander’s mouth, tongue slipping between his lips, probing. And Hollander—
Margaux had been shorter, and there had been nothing between her and Ilya as he sucked on her tongue. Marleau had been able to see the flex of his jaw as he mouthed, Come home with us, sweetly, against her ear. Margaux had been sandwiched between them, swaying along to the music, her small, perky ass pushing back against Marleau’s crotch. He remembered her hands pawing at Ilya’s shoulders.
Hollander was taller, and his hands stayed, obediently, on the counter.
Their lips parted with a wet sound that travelled down Marleau’s spine, all the way over to his groin. Ilya bumped his forehead against Hollander, but tilted his head towards Marleau, and asked, “What, next?”
Marleau said, “We took her home.”
“Da,” said Ilya. He let go of Hollander’s chin, the pads of fingers having left pale imprints on Hollander’s reddened skin.
“We got to my apartment,” said Marleau, and he considered what would come next, what the truth was, what the truth could be molded into, and added, “We started in the living room. She had another drink. She finished it all in one go.”
Hollander drank, and Marleau’s blood rushed into his ears. Ilya was grinning ear to ear, delighted and familiar, the way he would after a shootout goal, or after goading a player into a penalty. His own throat was parched. The glass of vodka was leaving a wet imprint to the inseam of his shorts.
“She stripped,” he said nevertheless, hoarsely, stepping over the point of no return, “in my living room,” but Hollander didn’t move, and Marleau didn’t know what he’d done wrong, where he’d miscalculated. He stalled, searched Ilya’s face for something. Anything.
“Dumb thing needs clear instructions,” said Ilya, as if it was obvious. “Too cock-hungry to think for herself. Mmm, da, like this. She presented herself to him,” he added, helpfully, “while I watched,” because many things had changed, in the years between, in those that had been swallowed by the fracture of their parting lives, but Ilya Rozanov still navigated sex the way he navigated ice, with self-assuredness and attention and single-minded focus, and always, always at least step ahead of everyone else.
Almost everyone else. Hollander walked over, and stood, for a long, stretched-out moment, in front of Marleau. Then, he began to undo the buttons of his shirt with practiced movements, an embarrassed flush spreading from his chest towards his neck. It couldn’t possibly be, but Marleau thought he could feel the heat radiating off his body, wave after wave of need and humiliation. He took in the flex of Hollander’s shoulders as he slipped one arm out of its sleeve, then the other. The small peaks of his nipples, dark and erect.
“She didn’t even bother to fold her clothes,” Ilya’s voice cut through them, rougher around the edges. “She let them fall to the floor.”
Hollander was not forthcoming, but he was earnest. This, of all things, seemed to unsettle him. His eyebrows pinched, and for a moment Marleau thought he’d disobey, talk back, and bring up whatever stupid reason why it would ruin a perfectly respectable piece of clothing.
He should have known better. Disobeying was incomprehensible.
Hollander closed his eyes and breathed deeply, head tilted in the direction of Ilya’s voice like a compass pointing North. He dropped the shirt. His hands undid the button of his shorts, then his zipper. He stepped out of each leg and discarded his pants, too. There was a darker, wet patch on the front of his boxer shorts where his cock had been steadily drooling precome.
Marleau was hard. The reality of it slammed him back into his body. He found himself aware of the weight of his cock, the tension in his thighs, the nervous, rhythmic clench of his abs. He wondered what it said about him, that his mouth was watering a little. He’d tasted his own come before, licked out of a slick pussy, or gathered with the pads of his fingers from the flushed cheeks of a hookup, pushed back into her waiting mouth before sucking it back off her tongue. What would Hollander taste like? He had a near-perfect diet. He exercised every morning, at dawn, and drank rarely. If there was one man who could taste nice, it was him.
Ilya, however. It was worse that he didn’t have to wonder.
“Druzhishe,” Ilya said, softly. He sounded closer than he’d expected. Marleau had squeezed his eyes closed, without realising. “I think we cheer. We took home the prettiest girl around.”
Marleau blinked his eyes open. Ilya now stood behind Hollander, fingers threading through Hollander’s hair. He’d turned the TV off. His free hand tipped the remaining vodka on the rocks towards him. They drank at the same time, and Marleau, despite everything, zeroed in on the inviting bob of Ilya’s Adam’s apple. The condensation from the thawing ice slid down the side of the glass and fell in cool, fat drops on his stomach and on his crotch, and each subsequent shudder he blamed on that, because it was easier to accept than any other alternative.
Ilya Rozanov: captain, club rat, comrade, confidant, friend. But this was not a night for truth, and so the thought ended there, on the familiar, jagged edge of precipice.
Ilya asked, “What after, Marly?”
Margaux had been vocal, a flood of promises and pleas: I want you to fuck me at the same time, push your cock between my tits, yes, like that. Fuck, your cock, so big, let me have a taste. Marleau said, “She kneeled without saying a word.”
Hollander dropped to his knees between Marleau’s spread legs, Ilya’s hand still on his hair. He landed with a quiet thump and sat back on his hunches, waiting for further instructions; Ilya’s grip on Hollander’s hair turned white-knuckled and Hollander fucking whined. “What did you want, Cliff?”
This was different. Marleau’s heart was hammering against his ribcage. Could they feel it, this furious, traitorous thumping, a betrayal on its own? Was he whining, too, like a pathetic little bitch? “You know what I fucking wanted, Roz,” he found himself saying.
Ilya cocked his head. “No, no, no,” he replied, faux-disappointed. He waved his index finger right to left and took another sip of his drink. “I don’t think I remember.”
Marleau was so fucking hard. He was so fucking gone, so fucking horny, so fucking angry, still. He felt blood rush to his own face. “I wanted her to get my cock out.”
“Why?” asked Ilya. “I am not sure. Ten years, you know. I forget.”
Ten years ago, he would have taken a bullet for Ilya Rozanov. What did it say about him, that he would still walk, willingly, into crossfire?
Hollander’s chest heaved. It glistened in the dim lights, sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat, dampening his hairline. If he hadn’t been gripping the glass, Marleau’s hands would have been shaking. Mortification burned red and hot in his veins, spread through capillaries into each of his limbs. His toes curled against the hardwood floor.
Ilya Rozanov of all people would know that stakes, in one way or another, made for a better fuck. Something always had to give.
Hollander’s mouth was pink and wet and just slightly parted. It would only look better stuffed full. “Because,” he ground out, “I wanted her to suck my cock.”
Ilya would have known, from memory, that sometimes Marleau forewent underwear. Hollander’s svelte, deft fingers found the hem of his shorts, and Marleau lifted his hips off the sofa to help him pull them down. His cock slapped against his stomach with a pathetic wet noise, smearing precome across his happy trail.
Hollander tried to lean forward, but was held back by Ilya’s unyielding grip, and so he looked up at Ilya, confused, like a scolded puppy. Marleau could see where it pulled on Hollander’s scalp. Could see that his eyes had begun to glaze over. He wondered if he was always this eager to get his mouth fucked.
With Margaux, Roz hadn’t been rough. Quite the opposite, truthfully: she’d laid him out on the bed, before giving him her back to ride him as she took Marleau’s cockhead into her mouth, each downward drag of her lips on him another inch of Ilya’s cock in her wet, hot cunt, and then up again, a continuous fluid oscillation. Ilya had been fucking up gently, his hands loose on her hips. But Hollander was not 5’4”, and he was at least a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle that was used to manhandling and bruising, and did not require, nor want, Marleau understood now, gentleness. This was a game, and all they had ever known, all three of them, was to play rough.
Marleau placed the glass of vodka, now thawed and empty, on the floor, and reached over to grab Hollander’s chest. He squeezed his pecs and Hollander reacted beautifully, the fucking slut, the cockwhore, the abased cunt, with a groan that rumbled from deep into his chest and an aborted attempt to get away from him. Ilya didn’t let him. If anything, he yanked him forward, and said, amused. “I remember now. You were always a tits man.”
Marleau pinched Hollander’s nipples, one at a time, then at the same time, just because Roz still knew him, despite everything, read him like an open book. He was a tits man: he liked them plump, bitten red, liked them into his mouth and speckled with his come. If he didn’t like to hurt them, not usually, it didn’t even matter: this wasn’t usual, and the truth was not important. And Hollander was so sensitive. He flicked his nipples, pinched and pulled them only to press back into the skin, enjoying the feel of each nub against the pad of his thumbs. All the while, Hollander yelped and groaned. Marleau was transfixed; he cupped his hands on the other swells of his pecs, pushed them together into the imitation of a cleavage, and spat one, two, three times. He smeared his saliva on Hollander’s abused areolas, thumbs circling around them, pressing, probing.
Hollander was shivering all over. His hands were clenching and unclenching by his sides. “Poor thing,” cooed Ilya. “Baby. Kotik. Does it hurt? Let me help.”
Hollander’s lashline was damp. He looked up, miserable, and tried to nod, uselessly. He mouthed, P’ease.
Ilya grabbed his own glass of vodka, and pressed it against Hollander’s right nipple. Hollander jolted, as if wounded, and squeezed his eyes closed, because the sudden aborted movement had pulled on his hair, and it must’ve hurt, the whole thing must hurt like a bitch. But, “Marleau, do the other,” Ilya was saying, “Since it feels so, so bad. Ice is good on bruises.”
Marleau barely had the time to pick his tumbler up and press it against Hollander’s chest, as if in a trance, before it was swatted out of his hands. The glass rolled away from them, leaving a wet trail behind it like a footprint at the scene of a crime.
“Khvatit,” said Ilya. He slammed his own glass down on the table, grabbed Hollander’s wrist, and wrenched it behind his back. That seemed to snap Hollander out of his thrashing: he stilled, eyes darting, frantic, between the floor, Marleau and Ilya. His lips curled around a word, but no sound came out. There were tears gathering in the corners of his eyes, and Marleau thought that this was it. Whatever line had been drawn in the sand, they had crossed it just now.
Except, his dick didn’t seem to be getting the memo. Khavit, whenever some rookie complained about bag drills a little too loudly; khavit, if one of his teammates was about to be pulled into a bar fight after one too many drinks; khavit, as he thrust pointlessly, unable to come, frustrated, into Margaux’s cunt, into her mouth. Hollander’s heavy breaths were the only audible sounds in the otherwise quiet home, his shoulder twisted in an awkward position, deltoid popping out, and yet all he could think about was, still, that he wanted to shove his cock between those lips, press it against the soft insides of the same mouth that had chirped back at him countless times, see if he could come like that, at last.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, Hollander’s face scrunched in a pitiful expression of regret. Not at him, of course; at Ilya. “’m sorry, ‘m so sorry, please, please, it was too much, I—”
The flat of Ilya’s palm met the curve of Hollander’s cheekbone with a cracking sound. He’d helpfully released some of the hold on his hair to allow just enough leeway for his head to tilt sideways, because he was nice like that, evidently. “Poor little Shane Hollander,” he murmured, tracing Hollander’s jawline with the same hand that had hit him. “Can take hit after hit on the ice but doesn’t know how to take a couple off of it?” He tugged him forward, so that it was clear he needed to focus on Marleau. “Will you disappoint him?”
“No,” babbled Hollander, frantic. Pain was welcome; disappointment was inconceivable. “No. I’m—please—I know—I can. Please.”
“Moy lyubov,” said Ilya, sweetly. “Of course, you won’t. It’s okay, I forgive you. Cliff, do you also forgive him?”
Electricity zinged down Marleau’s spine. He swallowed around nothing. “Yes.”
Ilya kneeled, too, pressing a kiss on top of Hollander’s head, right by his hand, then further down, on the nape of his neck. “You love asking for it, kotik,” he said, voice muffled against skin. “So ask.”
Hollander looked back at Marleau, eyes wide and dark and pleading. “Please,” he rasped. His eyelashes were damp; his cheek reddening where Ilya had slapped him, beneath the scatter of freckles. Marleau wondered if the rest of his body was as sensitive as his face and tits. If he would have the chance to find out, test it for himself. “Let me make it up to you,” Hollander said again, subdued, with a slow blink. “Please. Lemme—lemme suck your cock.”
Marleau may not be perceptive, but he wasn’t blind, either. If each word had sounded punched out of him, Hollander’s cock was still spurting more precome into the fabric of his underwear. As an athlete, Hollander lived his life in varying degrees of discomfort, not unlike him: cheap hotel beds; bloody knuckles; leftover bruises from a scrum, or from a rogue puck; stiff muscles after a hard drill; injuries. So did he like it, this servitude, this display of submission, or had he conditioned himself to enjoy every ache Ilya Rozanov meted out, training after training, fuck after fuck, victory after victory and loss after loss? He wished he’d time to freak out about this, to wonder when violence had become intertwined with pleasure, if this is all Ilya Rozanov knew, if this was why he’d left everything behind: this type of pleasure that could only run through the same nerve endings of pain.
Four months ago, Ilya had slammed into him during an overtime. He thought about it again, how his ribs had hurt for days. A reminder, a memento and a trophy not unlike the miniature of a city harbor.
He didn’t know how long he’d been silent for. “Cliff,” called Ilya.
“Yes,” said Marleau. “Yes. Suck my cock, like Margaux did.”
Ilya said, “Take your top off.”
Marleau did as he was told. Hollander rested his hands on Marleau’s thighs for balance and leant forward, placing a surprisingly chaste kiss against his chest, then more down the lines of his six-pack, close to his bellybutton. He buried his nose in the curls of Marleau’s groin, inhaling deeply, with a throaty whine, but bypassed his cock and instead offered soft, playful bites in the inside of his thighs. He liked teasing, then, other than being teased. So many discoveries tonight.
It was easier to focus on Hollander than on himself.
Ilya, never able to stay fucking still, was shoving Hollander’s briefs down his mid-thighs. “Well, this explains a lot,” he said. Marleau watched him press his knuckles in the crease of Hollander’s ass. “Remind me, Cliff. Was Margaux wearing a plug in her ass?”
Between them, Hollander made a strangled sound. Marleau felt him, rather than saw, press his face in the crook of his groin, breath wet and hot. His sweaty forehead bumped against his cock, which lay, angry red and untouched, against his thigh.
Truthfully, he couldn’t remember. He was only half-sure, ten years on, that he’d snorted more coke off the dimples in the small of her back. He knew the answer to this question, though, in the same way he’d known to trust Ilya’s intuition on the ice and his lead for the past hour. The script was still being written in front of him. All he had to do was read from it. It was just another strategy. It was a power play. Two on one.
For years, it’d been second nature to follow Roz’s orders. That hadn’t changed. So, even now, he said, “No.”
“Of course no-o-t,” Ilya sing-sang, with a swat on Hollander’s ass, “because Margaux was not a slut.”
Hollander mouthed something that could have been the start of a half-hearted Fuck you, but got drowned by a guttural groan as Ilya pulled the black plug just enough for Hollander’s rim to stretch around the widest part of it with a squelch. From his viewpoint, Marleau could see how obscenely taut it was, and for a moment panicked that it’d tear, but Ilya was murmuring something in Russian, tone once again sweet and comforting, and then was spitting right where silicone met skin. He spat again, and then once more, the sound of it distinct and filthy. He fucked the plug back in so hard that Hollander was knocked forward, nose and mouth against Marleau’s stomach.
Hollander had opened himself up sometime earlier that day, in preparation for this. The realization hit him like a punch in the gut. He wondered what it said about himself that this made his blood run even hotter, that it made him lightheaded, how easy he’d been for it. That Hollander had again been one step ahead of him.
Ilya slapped Hollander’s ass. The muscles of his glutes rippled with the force of his blows.
Marleau tried to direct his cock into Hollander’s mouth with a frustrated, pointless grunt. Hollander was being shoved back and forth, hole clinging to the plug and then accepting it back greedily, bumping nose and chin and cheekbone against his dick even as jaw-slacked as he was. Ilya, of course, caught on; he offered an exaggerated eyeroll, as if to say, I gotta do everything myself, shoved the plug back in, then grabbed the back of Hollander with one hand and pried his mouth open with the thumb and index finger to direct him on Marleau’s cock.
“Oh, fuck,” Marleau cursed, squeezing his eyes shut. His hands grabbed Hollander’s sweaty flanks, and holy fuck, holy shit. He was going to come. “Fuck, shit, fuck, oh my God.”
“Tell him,” said Ilya, and planted a kiss on the small of Hollander’s back, “how much you like to have a cock shoved so far down your throat that you can only choke on it?”
Hollander was not going to say anything. Marleau felt delirious. Ilya had resumed his hold on the plug, the relentless fuck back and forth. Marleau watched Hollander squeeze his eyes shut and breath, harshly, through his nose, the jet of hair tickling the inside of his thighs and the base of his dick, felt his cockhead breach his soft palate, get shoved down his throat with yet another mean push. Hollander swallowed around his length helplessly, saliva bubbling in the corner of his mouth, dribbling down his chin and onto the sofa. His face was blotched red, his eyes glassy if not closed. Each jerk of Ilya’s hand was a new, strangled moan reverberating into Marleau’s body through his dick.
Hollander crossed his wrist behind his back and clasped his hands together, relinquishing any ounce of power he would have had left. Marleau suddenly understood what would compel a man to abandon Boston for Ottawa, fuckass Canada.
The thought was so sudden and unexpected that it startled the promise of a laugh out of him. Except, Ilya pulled the butt plug out of Hollander’s ass once and for all. It had the result of making Hollander’s throat convulse around his cock so violently that it effectively smothered whatever amusement he might’ve felt.
He was now also steadily leaking precome. Ilya pulled Hollander off him, a string of saliva stretching from his cockslit to Hollander’s swollen lips, and shoved his fingers in instead. Hollander’s eyes rolled in the back of his head as Ilya’s hand got coated in precome and saliva and tears. “This,” Ilya said, “is the only lube you're going to get, Hollander. Does this make you wet, baby, yes? Such a fucking good boy, malysh.”
Marleau hadn’t even considered the reality of Hollander’s cock, bobbing flushed and heavy with each shuffle of his knees. But maybe he didn’t need to; Hollander gasped and coughed and shook his head and begged, angling his hips away, “No, please, don’t touch me, I’ll come. Not yet.”
Marleau had reached out to jerk him off, without even realising.
“You’re so easy,” Ilya marvelled, as if he didn’t know it already. Marleau wasn’t sure whom it was addressed to. “You’re so fucking easy. So much easier than any girl.”
Hollander’s mouth was on him again, hungry and inviting as Ilya worked three fingers inside of him all at once. Marleau watched them disappear inside his hole and grind in, searching, until Hollander moaned low and loud around him, cock giving pathetic little jerks with each drag against his prostrate.
“Fuck,” breathed Marleau, threading his fingers through Shane’s sweaty hair. He cupped his face from both sides, palms flat against his ears. “Oh, fuck. Such a nice fucking hole.”
Ilya’s curls were plastered against his forehead by now, a drunken flush spreading from the bottom of his navel to the high arch of his cheekbones. He shoved his shorts down so that they pooled around his knees, then lined himself against Hollander. “Come on, malysh, let him see what makes you special,” he urged, pushing in, inch after unforgiving inch, all fucking nine of them. “Why you’re better than any other woman or man I’ve fucked.”
The pace was brutal from the get-go. It had to a hurt, even a little, and how the fuck did Hollander sound so wet, like a girl? How much lube had he poured into himself while everyone else drank and cheered and exchanged tales of lives past?
Athlete, champion, husband, whore. Every punishing snap of Ilya’s hips shoved Hollander down his cock, had him drool helplessly onto his dick and down to the floor. Ilya snapped, “Marleau, fuck his face.”
“I don’t need you to fucking tell me,” barked Marleau, and yet he did. He was a man and he was a brother and he was a son and he was an athlete and he was a teammate and he was a limb, fucking into Hollander’s tight, wet mouth to the rhythm of someone else’s whim.
He heard sobbing. Hollander was sobbing, aborted little hiccups squeezing his dick. His hands were still clasped together at the small of his back, shoulders bunched together. It had to hurt. It all had to hurt.
“Did I tell you to stop? You know the word for stop,” said Ilya.
“He’s crying,” said Marleau, stupidly.
Ilya laughed, “Yes, I have eyes.” Then, “Give me your hands.”
The palms of Ilya’s hands were hot and damp with perspiration. Still, he held them, the muscles of his arms tensing as Ilya lifted them above his head. He was still guiding Hollander back and forth with the drag of his cock, his rim stretched around him, clinging onto Ilya’s cockhead when he pulled back, splitting open when he fucked forward. But the pace had slowed down enough that Hollander could really put his mouth to use, rather than act as a mindless fleshlight. He was curling his tongue on the sensitive underside of Marleau’s cockhead despite the tears drying on his pink cheek. Ilya said, “Tell Shane while he’s so much better than any girl.”
“No,” said Marleau. Then, he closed his eyes and added, betraying himself: “I couldn’t come. Margaux couldn’t make me come. I had to jerk myself off.”
“What else?” asked Ilya, squeezing his hands. His fingers were starting to hurt. “What else?”
Truth was not supposed to matter. “I had to jerk us off together,” Marleau blurted out, and tilted his face, pressing his nose against his own arm. Shame washed over him, diluted with something else he couldn’t name. Hollander was whining, long and high-pitched. “So I could come. And then I licked the come off my fingers, because I fucking liked it. But I am going to come now, fuck. I am going to come so far down your throat. Oh, my God. You’re so good. You’re such a good whore, Hollander. You’re gonna make me come.”
He felt the crescendo of Ilya’s hips, the way the pace picked up again, each thrust deep and hard against Hollander’s insides. The slap of skin on skin was obscene, and so was the wet, gagging sound of Hollander’s throat working him closer to his orgasm. He knew that, had he pressed his hand against the soft skin of his Adam’s apple, he could have traced the outline of his cock working its way inside his body. Marleau opened his eyes and looked at Ilya, amazed. But Ilya, eyebrows knitted together in concentration, lips pressed together in a tight line, wasn’t looking at him. Ilya was looking down at Hollander.
Roz would always be looking at Hollander.
Their hands disentangled; Ilya buried his hips into the man he’d married and stayed in, hips circling in a slow grind, the intrusion shocking and overwhelming, so much to even witness; Marleau felt as if Ilya was fucking him through Hollander’s overused hole, and that, too, left him reeling, this unexpected ache inside of him a bruise of its own.
Ilya shuffled back, taking Hollander with him. His lips left his cock with a loud, wet pop. The sound it tore out of Marleau was wounded, animal-like. Before he could protest, however, before he could plead and grovel, to please, let him fucking come, Ilya draped himself over Hollander: one of his hands clasped, firmly, around Hollander’s neck; the other formed a tight ring around Marleau’s cock.
Ten years ago, their roles had been reversed. It still wouldn’t be enough to even out the score.
Ilya bit Hollander's shoulder as he kept stroking him fast and hard, almost painful. Marleau saw the mark he left behind, perfect imprint of his teeth, and felt that ache as if his own. “Come,” Ilya grunted, “malysh, moy lyubov. Come for me.”
Margaux had come on Ilya’s cock with Marleau’s thumb pressing against her oversensitive clit, his tongue licking into her cunt. Now, Hollander’s cock gave a last twitch and shot hard and hot between them, untouched, with Ilya's hand around his pretty, abused throat.
“Come on, Cliff, fuck,” said Ilya, exertion weighing in the hard inflection of each word, and Marleau knew he was coming, too, because he'd been there once, and had never forgotten. “Come on his face.”
Disobeying was never an option. Marleau did. As he whited-out, draping rope after rope of white on Hollander's pretty, wrecked face, he thought, of all things, of the bottle perfume waiting for him at the bottom of his travel bag. He hoped it'd smell of smoke, or aged cognac.