if there is a god, he's the bond that's between us

Something I think about with the Long Game ending is the sex scenes. I don't necessarily mind Ilya's first reaction to Shane struggling being sex. I feel like thats the very first way Shane and Ilya learned to communicate, and it's something that settles both Shane and Ilya. The problem is that there's nothing after. Sex is how they first learned to communicate, but by the end of HR they're starting to learn to communicate with their words, and that learning process is ostensibly one of the big points of conflict in TLG. To make their character arcs work, Shane and Ilya should be communicating verbally and figuring out a compromise that makes both of them at least mostly happy at least at the end of the book. This would be a way to show Ilya as the good partner that he's supposed to be. Instead, Ilya fucks Shane and there's no follow up conversation. This lack of communication makes it seem like Ilya does not care about Shane outside of him being some kind of sex doll and is a shitty way to finish the book and a terrible ending for both Ilya and Shane.

Own it: Connor and Hudson on being yourself