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Winter was always unforgiving in Ottawa, but never as much as it had been in the past three days. Wind screamed through the streets, sending the innocent walkers who were unlucky enough to have a place to be tumbling across the sidewalks. The city was pounded by a heavy, relentless snow that covered everything with a thick, wet blanket of white. Worst yet, the cold made it impossible for the salt trucks to get out, leaving the roads icy and slick. It was a cataclysmic disaster, and Shane loved it.
A Canada boy born and bred, Shane was used to the snow, but he couldn’t help but marvel every time Mother Nature threw a particularly horrible tantrum and descended upon the city. He and Ilya sat in the bay window of their Ottawa home, taking in the snowstorm that glittered through the wan light of the rising sun. Shane wanted to revel in this moment just a little longer before they drove to the rink together for an early-morning practice: reading glasses on and a cup of tea in hand, Ilya head nestled into his lap, playing Animal Crossing on his Switch, with Anya snuggled in her dog bed at his feet. It was a rare Sunday where they weren’t on the road, and Shane wanted to make the most of it.
Shane scratched circles into Ilya’s scalp, smiling down at him as he snuggled sweetly into his blanket and stared intently at the screen. “What are you working on right now?”
Ilya’s eyes stayed trained on his game. “It is Poncho’s birthday. I must find him gift for his party before we go to practice, or he will be sad and alone all day.” Ilya tilted the Switch toward Shane and, sure enough, a navy blue creature in a rugby shirt stared back at him, frowning because everyone had “forgotten his special day.” Ilya grumbled something about an ungrateful bear in Russian and settled back into his game.
Shane smiled and shook his head. It was moments like these when Shane was almost glad that the hockey world saw Ilya as just another meat-headed asshole. How special it was, the juxtaposition of being unknown with the true self–to be in on that secret. Hockey Twitter would have a meltdown if they knew that Ilya talked to every villager on his island each day to ensure that none of them felt left out.
Shane’s phone pinged. The message preview showed, Hey boys, the weather isn’t…
“That’s weird,” Shane muttered, unlocking the screen to read the full thing.
“What is?”
“We just got a text about the weather…” Shane’s eyes skimmed the screen. “Shit, practice is cancelled. I haven’t had a snow day like this since I was a kid!”
As a child, Shane had had a love-hate relationship of sorts with snow days. The disruption of his routine could have sent him spiraling, but it meant more time to play hockey and hang out with his parents, so it worked out alright in the end. His father would make banana pancakes for breakfast, his mother would set up a rink for him to play on in their backyard pond, and the day would be devoted to being out on the ice.
Ilya blinked at Shane, slowly putting down his Switch and sitting up. “What the fuck is snow day? It is winter, it snows every day.”
“No, y’know, snow days!” Ilya continued to stare at him blankly, gesturing for him to explain. “It’s like… okay, so when it snows a lot, or when it’s really, really cold outside, schools and shops close because it’s dangerous to go outside,” Shane winced at how inarticulate he probably sounded before plowing on. “Bad roads and stuff.”
Ilya had the same look on his face that he had when he heard a loon for the first time: a mix of shock, disgust, and horror that furrowed his eyebrows and pinched his lips so aggressively that Shane had to reach out to smooth them. He ran his thumb over Ilya’s cheek gently, to keep whatever was upsetting him at bay. “What, baby?”
Ilya’s mouth moved, but sounds didn’t come out. Because anxiety was fundamentally rooted in Shane’s core, he started to spiral, thinking through everything he’d said about snow days and whether any of it could have possibly been offensive. Was snow day a euphemism for something in Russia? Did Ilya’s mother die on a snowy day? Were winter car accidents common in his family? “I’m—sorry?” he managed to stutter out, to remedy whatever issue he had clearly caused.
After what felt like an eternity, during which Shane managed to prepare six-and-a-half potential scripts to respond to Ilya’s obvious offense and probable proposal of a divorce, Ilya threw his head back and howled with laughter. Between tears, he wheezed out, “What, Canadians so weak they cannot go out in snow?”
Shane buffered, processed, corrected. “Cannot go out when there’s lots of snow. It only happens a couple times a year!” When Ilya just cackled louder, Shane’s voice grew shrill. He added, “Fuck you, Rozanov! It’s a safety thing!”
“Ah yes, safety! The big, scary snow is coming to get you!” Ilya fell backward away from Shane, fully lying on the seat of the bay window and hugging a pillow to his stomach. He nudged Shane’s thigh teasingly with his knee. “Do you know how much snow they get in Moscow? Would destroy puny Canada snow and little Canadian snow days.”
Shane was undeterred by this. Surely, Russian schools had some equivalent to a snow day. One of Shane’s core childhood memories was watching the scrolling list districts at the bottom of CTV News the morning after a big snowstorm, hoping that his school would be named next. He couldn’t imagine a world where Ilya didn’t have something similar. “But what did you do when it snowed too much for a car or a bus to take you to school?”
“Walk,” Ilya said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.
“Walk?!” Shane cried.
“Da, Shane, walk! Wear a coat and a hat and it was fine.” Ilya did not seem at all concerned by this revelation, and Shane made a mental note to look up whether frostbite or hypothermia could retroactively affect someone. Every time Ilya revealed some horrifying, universal truth from his childhood in Russia, Shane waited for him to say psyche! and replace the statement with something that didn’t make Shane’s heart constrict in his chest. When Ilya didn’t, just snuggled back into Shane’s lap and picked his Switch back up, Shane decided to drop the issue entirely. He sipped on his tea and tried entirely too hard to focus on the biography of Wayne Gretzky that he was reading. When the book didn’t distract him, he moved to scrolling on his phone.
“So what do you do on this big snow day?” Shane jumped at Ilya’s voice. Ilya smiled up at him serenely, his eyebrows quarked, and Shane put his phone to the side to oblige the question.
“My mom used to take me out on the pond in our neighborhood. That’s how I learned how to skate. I swear, I thought she could fly. And then, after being out there for hours, we’d come inside and cuddle on the couch and watch old school Christmas movies while my dad made cookies and hot chocolate. It was awesome.”
Shane closed his eyes and welcomed the memory of it. The warmth of it made his chest feel fuzzy. His mother, in her thickest down jacket, skating circles around him while he practiced his puck handling or his slap shot or his crossovers. Shouting encouragements or tips to him whenever something didn’t quite go right. Reminding him that he was worth every boy on his team and more when he’d get frustrated or cry about the names they called him at practice. The best thing Shane could do, she had always said, was prove them wrong.
And so, snow days became a religious experience. His skates were communion, his stick the altar, his mother a goddess. Everyone assumed that his father, McGill extraordinaire, had gotten him into hockey, but no. It was Yuna and snow days, a routine of their own when the routine of school was a rug pulled out from under him.
Shane’s smile at the memory dropped away when he realized how intently Ilya was staring at him. When the person you love has experienced so much trauma, it could feel selfish–mean, even–to have had something as normal as a snow day spent with parents who would give you the moon if you wanted it. He’d play it off, usually, with a joke, but the sting was always there: Ilya hadn’t had snow days. He had barely had a family, just a scraped-together collection of statues who pushed him past his breaking point, simply because they could.
Because they were made of stone.
Shane wished he could wipe away all of that pain and replace it with some of his own childhood memories.
Instead of making fun of Shane, though, Ilya said animatedly, “I want to do that.”
“Do what?”
Ilya gestured nebulously out the window at the snow that was gathering in drifts in their yard. “Have snow day. Go outside and watch movie and eat David’s boring cookies.”
“My dad’s cookies were not boring! They were chocolate chip.” Ilya’s eyebrows shot up, and Shane raced to continue speaking before Ilya could claim this as a victory. “Classic cookies, not boring cookies. And he’d put in chunks of a Hershey’s bar, too.”
A smirk contorted Ilya’s features. “Was recipe from The New Yorker?”
“No! Well—maybe…” Shane considered it briefly as Ilya began to snicker. “Oh, fuck you. You’re ruining one of the most sacred memories from my childhood!”
Ilya held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. I fix. Eat David’s not boring cookies and have fun day without work or school or responsibilities. I want to do that.”
Shane felt his smile overtake his every feature. “Okay.”
Ilya smiled back, making Shane feel dazed. “Okay. So what do we do first?”
❆ ❆ ❆ ❆ ❆
Twenty minutes later, the three of them–Shane, Ilya, and Anya–stood in the backyard, bundled in hats and scarves and gloves and sturdy boots. Shane watched contentedly as Anya frolicked through the snow, snapping up fat snowflakes as they fell, and Ilya took advantage of his distractedness to pelt him with a snowball. It hit Shane’s shoulder with a loud thwack.
“Hey!” Shane tried to bellow in mock outrage, though he was already laughing and piling together the snow to throw something in return. Ilya, of course dodged it with grace–though, if Shane was being honest with himself, he had thrown to miss, too enamored with watching Ilya dance through the snow. “Snowball fights are not part of the Hollander snow day tradition! We’re supposed to start with hockey.”
“I don’t want to play hockey!” Ilya whined, falling into a snowbank beside Anya and giving her a pat. Her tail wagged in response. “All we ever do is hockey, hockey, hockey. It gets boring. I want to make snowmen and snowdog for you, me, and Anya.”
Sometimes, loving Ilya felt like making up for lost time. Like refinding the wonderful moments in childhood that were supposed to define you and wiping away the bad ones. Shane thought his feelings might be hurt, if Ilya didn’t want to follow the routine of his snow days past exactly as it was scripted twenty-some years ago. Instead, he felt a lightness that he wished he could have felt at eight years old, running drills with his mother in the snow, as he watched Ilya stoop into the blanket of white and start to push around snowballs until he had three massive lumps.
After five minutes of this, Ilya crowed triumphantly, gesturing toward his piles of snow. “It is done!”
Shane tried not to laugh. “What are those?”
“It is us, obviously. This is me–” Ilya pointed at the largest pile of snow, all lumps and rounded edges and zero discernable features. “This is you–” He pointed at the pile beside it, similarly unrecognizable. “And this is Anya.” “Anya,” if you could call it that, was a much smaller, more compact blip on the ground.
Shane blinked and squinted a few times, wondering if it was time for him to start wearing his reading glasses full-time. “Those are awful.”
Ilya, hand to his chest, gasped. “Shane Hollander! That is very rude. This is perfect representation of our family. Look, Anya knows which one is hers.” Sure enough, Anya was squatted beside her indistinct snow lump; yellow spots bloomed along the side.
Shane rolled his eyes and crossed toward Ilya’s “snow people.” “You’re right, my love. How could I have doubted you?” He went in for a kiss, which Ilya dodged, frowning.
“Because you are asshole who does not appreciate art. Is abstract, yes? You are medium one because of the rabbit food, and I am big one because I am so strong and handsome, and Anya is little one because she is dog.”
Shane tried, and failed, to resist the urge to burst out laughing. Ilya squirmed, clearly trying hard not too look too pleased with himself. “Yes, of course, obviously.” He ran his hand along Ilya’s side, and Ilya leaned into him, finally allowing himself to smile. “You are so strong and handsome.”
Ilya preened for a moment, and Shane took advantage of the moment to press a kiss to the corner of his jaw and place their foreheads together. Even now, standing in their backyard in the midst of the swirling snow, he still marveled at the newness of it all, the loving without restriction, without boundaries. It felt like a promise. Like magic. Not the magic of snow day routines and hockey and chocolate chips cookies and his parents, but something stronger.
Love.
Ilya, as if he knew when Shane’s mind went too sappy and didn’t quite know what to do with the feeling, completely switched gears. “Okay, I am freezing my dick off here. Next snow day activity, please?”
Shane harumphed before nodding into his neck. “Let’s go make cookies.” When Ilya raised his eyebrows at him, he added defeatedly, “I’ll even eat a few. My mom always said that diets don’t count on snow days.”
❆ ❆ ❆ ❆ ❆
Once they were inside and out of their winter gear, Shane pulled out his phone to text his parents. Ilya hummed beside him, peeking through cabinets to see if they had the ingredients necessary to scrape together the cookies. Already, Ilya was messy in a way that felt like home: hair askew, floury handprints on the apron he’d just put on, fumbling with the assorted baking supplies he’d been able to scrounge up. Shane’s throat constricted with a love so deep that he forgot why he’d unlocked his phone. He snapped a picture of Ilya, lips pursed in concentration as he cracked eggs into a warm yellow mixing bowl, and sent it to his parents.
Shane: Enjoying practice off today. Too much snow.
Shane: Did you know they don’t have snow days in Russia? So I’m treating Ilya to a proper Canadian snow day.
Mom: Really? I feel like they have to, with all the snow they get.
Mom: Stay safe and have fun! It’s cold out there! 🥶🥰☃️🌬️
Dad: Eh, that doesn’t surprise me. Snow days are for the weak.
Dad: What your mom said. Good choices only.
Shane: Ilya said they’re for the weak, too! I told him to fuck off. We got snow days.
Shane: And we always make good choices.
Dad: Not weak, but we aren’t made of the same stuff as the Russians. It’s the vodka. Keeps them warm.
Shane: Haha. I’ll tell Ilya you said so.
“What are you laughing at?” Ilya’s arms snaked their way over Shane’s shoulders as he buried his face into Shane’s back. Shane winced at the thought of flour on the back of his favorite hoodie, but he shook it off and held up his phone for Ilya to see the screen.
“Dad said that Russians are better equipped for the weather because of the vodka. That’s why you didn’t have snow days..”
Ilya tittered behind Shane, his breath warm on Shane’s neck. It filled Shane with a sense of desire so deep that he was prepared to forget about the cookies entirely and jump right into a snow day activity that certainly wasn’t on his childhood agenda. “Mmm, is right. Who needs snow day when you can drink the sorrows and cold away. Vodka burns.”
He was only half joking, Shane knew, putting up a front to protect himself from talking about something too real, but Shane allowed it.
“What did he say about cookies?” Ilya gestured to the random assortment of potential baking supplies he’d gathered on the counter: eggs, flour, butter, sugar, and—
“I still have to ask him, but before I do, what the fuck are those?” The final ingredient that Ilya had put out on their kitchen counter was a bag of sour gummy worms, a neon island in the blues and whites of their kitchen.
“Bag of gummy worms?” Ilya asked hopefully.
“No. Absolutely not. I will not ruin my dad’s chocolate chip cookie recipe with gummy worms.”
Ilya stamped his foot a little, dropping his arms from Shane’s neck and crossing them over his chest. “But it is my snow day.”
“It’s our snow day, asshole,” Shane replied, moving toward the counter to toss the sour gummy worms back into Ilya’s special junk food drawer. “And I’m technically the expert, remember?”
Ilya’s brows were furrowed in the way they get before he throws a tantrum or tries to strike a deal. Shane knew the look well; it was the same one he gives when he’s in a face-off, or when he’s convincing Shane to walk Anya with him so they aren’t lonely, or when he used to whisper his room number to Shane as they floated past each other during warm ups. The face was dangerous, and Shane predicted his words right before he said them.
“How about—”
“No.” Shane leaned against the counter, crossing his arms.
“Please?” Ilya stared back, eyes burning with intensity.
“Absolutely not.”
“You do not know what I was going to ask!” Ilya complained, his nose scrunched in protest. He tried to skirt around Shane to get to the junk drawer, but Shane intercepted him, pulling him into a hug and squeezing him tight.
“Yes, I do,” he whispered into Ilya’s ear. “You’re going to ask me to make some ridiculous bet, like can you get me hard without touching me, and then you’re going to break the rules somehow and win and I’ll need to put gummy worms in our cookies.”
Ilya squirmed away from him and gestured to himself, mouth agape. “You do not think very highly of me, clearly. Mind out of the gutter, Hollander.”
Shane loved the way English idioms sounded on Ilya’s tongue. He raised his hands in defeat and said, “Okay, what’s your idea?”
Ilya smiled devilishly. “You text David and ask for recipe. If it is from not-boring website, then we make them like he did. But if it is from New Yorker…”
“We put gummy worms in them?” Shane guessed.
“We put gummy worms in them,” Ilya responded gravely.
Ilya and Shane stared at each other. Ilya looked so young, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and his face pinched, hair mussed from wearing a hat in the cold. Shane could feel himself starting to smile, and he fought to wipe it off his face. After years of competing on and off the ice, Shane had long since realized that–as much as he wanted to–he would never have a poker face like Ilya had.
So, of course, he broke first. “Fine. Let me text him.” Shane pulled out his phone and shot off anther text to his father.
Shane: Can you send me the recipe for the cookies you always baked on snow days?
Dad: Sure, bud. Let me find it.
Shane slipped his phone into his pocket and smiled up at Ilya. “C’mere,” he said, hoping to distract Ilya–or, himself, if he was being fully honest–from the gummy worms.
Ilya’s eyes glinted with the challenge. “No, you come here.”
They floated toward each other, as if pulled by an unshakeable magnetic force. They’d done this dance before. Shane always lost, but he loved to play the game. “No, you come here.”
Ilya’s lips found the soft spot where Shane’s jaw met his neck, and he murmured into it, “No, you come here.”
Ilya kissed him so softly and tenderly that, when the phone vibrated in his pocket, Shane groaned loudly. Ilya, with his shit-eating grin, broke away from him and murmured, “You should probably get that.”
Shane tried not to whine as he unlocked his phone. “He just sent me the recipe.”
“Is it from New Yorker?”
Shane opened the link his dad sent him. As the website loaded, he prayed to every deity he could think of that it wasn’t.
“Fuck.”
❆ ❆ ❆ ❆ ❆
As the day unraveled on its spool into evening, Shane, Ilya, and Anya found themselves curled around each other on the coach, their fireplace roaring. A Hallmark movie about some girlbossCEOfromthebigcityinasmallChristmastreefarmtown flickered on the TV, but Shane could not have told you a single thing about it, too tired and content to take in anything other than the steady sound of Ilya breathing and the crackle of the fire. The gummy worm chocolate chip cookies had not been a success, just a textural nightmare that had scorched in the oven from the extra sugar content, but Shane didn’t mind. Ilya’s head rested in his lap, remnants of the Chinese food they had braved the five minute drive to pick up still sitting in an open take-out container on the coffee table, and he settled into sense of calm that he had forgotten could exist in the whirlwind of hockey and fame. It felt like kindergarten snow days.
It felt like home.
Shane stooped over to plant a kiss in Ilya’s hair. “Did you have a good snow day?” Shane whispered into the curls.
“Mhm,” Ilya murmured in response, clearly fighting to stay awake. His hands were fisted into Anya’s fur as he spooned her like a giant stuffed animal. She snored. “Maybe we can have another one tomorrow?”
Shane snorted with laughter. The roads would be clear enough that tomorrow would be just another normal day, he was sure; Canadians were made of tougher stuff than most, after all– even if they weren’t Russian. “Probably not. Like I said, it’s not like we get them all the time. The plows and salt trucks are probably out right now.”
Ilya nodded but did not respond. As Shane traced swirling patterns on his back, his eyes fully closed. Within seconds, his breathing was even and his face was slack-jawed and soft, so unlike its usual sharp angles.
Shane wished he could sit in this moment forever. It wasn’t a surprise day off on the ice with his mother, in the kitchen with his father, in the living room with the only two people he thought would be able to love him for whom he was but…
To be allowed to spend the day with the man who had changed his life, who had made every day feel like a snow day?
It was better.