Cliff has always kind of wanted to fight this guy, he thinks, in the way friends do. In the way sometimes Roz or one of the others will grapple with him or each other, laughing, because everyone involved can take it. Because they're on the same level, and when they're warm and drunk in one of their homes they're sealed away from the world and all that matters is that the other body is close and willing and sweet with it. Bitter, with just a hint of burnt sugar that makes it something to savor.
Cliff has never wanted that from chicks. Not really. Sometimes he thinks violence and sex are too entwined for him to be normal about either, that he's always been unsatisfied with fucking because it can't hurt him, not the way every hookup has ever wanted it. And asking a stranger to slap him across the face is way weirder and probably creepier than calling to mind the way blood exploded in his nose last month, when he earned himself a satisfying punch, to make sure he stays hard.
And it's fucked up that he's looking at Art and wishing this near stranger would grab him by the hair and slam his face into the bar. He doesn't like the thought of him being angry, which is the only way he could get it so it's stupid, but he wishes there was a way it could be because he asked.
Cliff has wished, more than once, that he could walk up to Hollander after a game and ask for something similar. He'd pay, if it were possible, to be thrown hard into a wall, to be strangled, to be pinned and held and told "I win", in that low, satisfied tone he's only heard a few times. Hollander always sounds a bit rough after a fight.
-'I have never known hunger' chapter six