Previously: The tampon scene through Grey’s eyes, which made it more awful.
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Alex: Before we get started, I’d just like to apologise for the delays in getting Grey recaps out so far this year, all of which have been entirely my fault. I promise I’ll get my shit together for the next one!
Anyway, here we go. The chapter opens and would anyone like to guess what Grey is doing? That’s right! He’s… waking up! He’s being woken up by Ana, who’s talking in her sleep. Her ‘whispered words penetrate [his] slumber’.
Marines: I’ll just add the classic:
Alex: Ana is muttering ‘don’t leave me’. Christian is momentarily confused and doesn’t know where he is, before he remembers that he stalked Ana all the way to Savannah. Sorry, Grey, but the rest of us aren’t going to forget that quite so easily. Ana adds ‘I won’t leave you’ to her sleep-muttering, and Grey is very glad to hear that. Hey, asshole, how do you know that she’s talking about you? (I mean, she is, because she adds ‘Christian’ a few sentences later, but he totally just assumed she was anyway).
Jessica: I love how he keeps responding to her, even though she’s clearly asleep. He’s puzzled about it for a while though. Grey, that’s not how sleeping works.
Mari: He seriously spends a few lines like, “she’s talking but… she’s sleeping. What is this witchcraft?” It’s sleep talking, Grey.
Alex: Well, he has never shared a bed with another person before so…. maybe he genuinely doesn’t understand what sleep-talking is? Or maybe E. L. James is just a crappy writer. Either/or.
‘But Alex’, I hear you all cry, ‘at what EXACT time is all this exciting sleep-talk happening?’ I’m glad you asked! It’s 4:57am. (J: It’s never exactly an o’clock, did anybody notice? No? Yeah I’ve been trying not to, too.) Grey gets this information from the ‘radio alarm’, so I guess I missed the part where they time-travelled back to the nineties. (J: Radio alarms are the emails of time measurement.) We also get the added bonus of a weather report from Grey, just to really get this chapter going: ‘Another hot day with high humidity. No Rain’.
As Grey gets dressed, he has a mini-flashback to that time when Ana wore his boxers. That’s right. E. L. went there. She just copied and pasted a paragraph from about ten chapters ago in this very book. And this woman is a millionaire. I think I need to go lie down somewhere quiet for a while.
Mari: If we haven’t posted for some time, just assume we were working on a post but then had to go lie down somewhere quiet for a long while.
Alex: Ana says some more weird stuff in her sleep, until Grey wakes her up by biting her earlobe. Dude. No. Ana is super sleepy, and I guess I am too, because when Grey says ‘I’m going to switch on the side light’ I first read it as ‘I’m going to switch to the light side’. I’ve clearly been to see The Force Awakens too many times. (J: Woo!) Anyway. Grey is amused by Ana’s sleepiness and thinks about how novel it is not to be able to punish her, because apparently his previous submissives would have been ‘disciplined’ for this. Ugh.
Ana is relieved that Grey doesn’t want to have sex with her right now (me too, Ana, me too) but not happy to be dragged out of bed at 5:30am for reasons that Grey chooses not to reveal to her yet. He forbids her from showering, in case they accidentally end up spending all day having sex in the shower instead of going out.
J: Not to bring it all up again but, like, the blood and everything from last night? And none of them are showering?? Yeeegh. Also, if anyone woke me up at 5-whatever-a.m. and whispered “we’re going to chase the dawn” in my ear, they’d get a palm to the face. Romance does not exist that early in the morning.
Mari: Especially if there is period blood all over the place. Just. No.
Alex: I hadn’t even thought about all the bloody sex that happened last night. Eww. Take a shower, people.
We get another tedious ‘eat something’ / ‘no’ / ‘eat something’ / ‘no’ exchange for what feels like the millionth time. Grey threatens to spank Ana, but then gets pissed off when she implies that she might enjoy that. ‘It doesn’t work that way’, he thinks to himself, by which he means that sexytimes may only happen when Ana doesn’t want them. (J: RAGE.) Instead he goes and fetches her one of his sweatshirts from the ‘armoire’, because he’s a pretentious douche.
Ana and Grey go downstairs in the elevator with some cool dude called Brian, and of course they both blush and think about sex a lot because elevators = hot.
J: Meanwhile poor Brian is probably repeatedly pressing the next floor button all “come on, come on…”
Mari: Brian is all of us.
Alex:
Now there’s some pretentious chat about opera, just to remind us that these two are like, sooo smart and cultured and better than everyone else. (M: Even when they are only driving Mustangs.) And then Ana gets bored listening to opera, so she sticks Britney’s Toxic on the radio instead. Christian has a little freakout over why Ana chose this song, and thinks the excellent line ‘does she think I should wear a warning?’. Man, this chapter practically snarks itself.
We get another mini-flashback from Grey, where he recalls Leila asking to put some music on his iPod for him: ‘Sir, this submissive respectfully requests Master’s iPod’. Leila asks this while he’s sat at his desk reading a spreadsheet. What, like it’s a newspaper? Who just sits and ‘reads’ a spreadsheet? Further proof that Grey only ever pretends to do any work.
Grey drives ‘as Britney continues at her sultry best’. I’m not making this up, I swear.
Mari: And this is how we all learn that Grey thinks Toxic-era Britney was the best Britney. Illuminating. Let us all be grateful that at least it isn’t I’m A Slave 4 U.
Alex: He reveals to Ana that it was Leila who put Toxic on his iPod, and then they chat a bit about his relationship history. And then for some reason the conversation switches to Ana’s menstrual cycle. Grey insists that it’s very important for him to know exactly when her period’s due, because then he won’t get her pregnant. Huh? Ana says that she wouldn’t want that to happen for at least a few more years, and this upsets Grey because he imagines she’ll eventually have kids with someone else.
J: Meanwhile, all the rest of us are screaming: Don’t have kids! Either of you! Even in a fictional universe!!!1!1!!
Alex: Ana freaks out when Christian says they’re going to an airfield, worried that he might be flying her back to Seattle. Grey laughs at her. Red flag number 76324948: when you have reason to worry that your boyfriend might forcibly fly you home from your vacation against your will.
Grey finally reveals to Ana that they’re going ‘soaring’, and Ana has basically the exact opposite reaction to what mine would have been. Which would have been something like ‘Fuck no, I can’t believe you got me out of bed at 5:30am for this, no no no no no. NO.’
Taylor is at the airfield already, and I dread to think what time this means he had to wake up. He introduces the pilot, some British dude called Benson, who says a bunch of stuff about wind speed and convergence and whatever. (J: Basically, ELJ going “La la la look I Googled something! La la Terminology!”) Then Ana pisses Grey off by daring to say ‘see you later’ to Taylor, and Grey is unimpressed by her ‘familiarity with my staff’. I cross my fingers extra tight that there’s going to be a huge plot twist any minute now, and this book will turn out to be set in a parallel universe where Grey’s stupid glider thingy crashes to the ground in a blazing fireball.
I skip over a whole page and a half of Grey talking about planes, pausing only to note that the British pilot guy calls the toilets ‘jakes’. I’ve lived in the UK for 31 years and I have literally never heard anyone call them that in my entire life. A quick Google search suggests that they might once have been called that in 16th-century England. WTF? Isn’t E. L. James supposed to be English?
J: Wow, ELJ even ruined her own country’s slang. Maybe the ‘americanisms’ thing isn’t just the US/UK divide. Maybe she’s got some kind of rare mental condition.
… Oh guys, I just had a thought. This is based on Twilight, yeah? So Christian/Edward is all vampirish-ly old and stuff. Hence, 16th century slang, which got past editors. Probably because the editors were passed out from booze long before this point, if they even existed at all.
Mari: It was funny when she got the Americanisms wrong but this is hilarious. At least you guys can disown her now.
Alex: Can we really? Please? That would make me so happy.
Grey is so paranoid and jealous that he won’t even allow the pilot to put Ana’s parachute on her, and insists on doing it himself. Ana doesn’t object, which just further proves what a complete and utter moron she is. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d definitely be insisting on the professional pilot with all the proper qualifications sorting out this essential safety feature for me.
I skip over another couple of pages of description about plane controls and something about clouds. You’re welcome. Then they’re up in the air, and Grey makes the glider do some loopy-loop stuff. Meanwhile, I find a new contender for Best Line In The Book:
‘My joystick moves in my hands, and I know she’s holding hers’.
Definitely the most erotic thing I’ve read in this story so far. (M: A+)
For something that should be kind of thrilling, this gliding scene is soooo boring that I’ve basically skipped the whole thing and now they’re landing again. Ana, however, loved it so much that she starts making out with Grey as soon as they get out of the glider. Grey has to pull away before he accidentally has sex with her, or something. They just walk away, leaving the glider right there in the middle of a field for Poor Taylor to deal with.
Mari: On the scale of horrible things to deal with, though, an abandoned glider is a millionty seven times better than Ana and Grey having field sex. Buck up, Poor Taylor.
Alex: They drive to IHOP while listening to Kings of Leon. (J: Yeah, that sentence just happened. And the scene just gets weirder, IMO). Ana’s alarm goes off to remind her to take her pill, and Christian reminds us for the bajillionth time that he hates using condoms. WE KNOW. They’re both so horny that they briefly consider having sex in the IHOP bathroom, but decide against it. I don’t know about you guys, but if I’d woken up at 5:30 and been taken gliding on an empty stomach and then someone suggested sex (M: IN AN IHOP BATHROOM), my answer would be something like ‘hahahahahahaha that’s a good one, now where are my goddamn pancakes?’
A waitress comes to their table, but of course stumbles over her words because Grey’s just Too Pretty. (J: At first I forgot what I was reading and thought it was just because she was uncomfortably awkward over the obvious fuck-me eyes they were giving each other.) Grey places their order and finishes it with ‘English Breakfast tea, if you have it’, because apparently we’re going to keep pretending that Ana’s taste in hot beverages is just soooo unusual and sophisticated. As if it’s even a remote possibility that IHOP would not serve tea. (J: Much less the rare, exotic Twinings brand.) (M: Maybe someone told James that America doesn’t have tea…? We did dump it into the Boston Harbor that one time in the 18th century.)
Ana tells Grey that it’s not fair how he disarms women with his looks. He replies with ‘do I disarm you?’ which of course calls for this gif:
J: A++ and extra pancakes.
Alex: Ana asks if Grey’s changed his mind about having a proper relationship, and he replies with ‘we just need to redefine our parameters’. Such a wordsmith. He tells her that as long as she agrees to be submissive in the playroom, then they can have a ‘discussion’ about the rest of their arrangement. How romantic.
They eat their pancakes, and Ana asks if she can pay for the meal since it’s one of the few places she can afford. I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but I actually think this is pretty cute of her. However, Grey is of course a total dick about it and accuses her of trying to ‘completely emasculate me’. Oh well.
J: This infuriated me the most out of the entire chapter. ‘Emasculate’? REALLY??
Mari: I vividly remember Sweeney and I having a ball with the fact that some, I don’t know, Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity pancakes emasculate Christian Grey. Good times.
Alex: It’s maddening. Maybe it’s supposed to be generous and chivalrous, but it just comes across as sexist, immature and controlling.
Grey drives Ana back to her mum’s house, then heads back to the hotel to do some work. Well, I say ‘work’, but of course he starts exchanging emails with Ana as soon as he gets to his room. We get another few pages of copy/paste emails from the first book, where Grey teases Ana about talking in her sleep last night.
He eventually has to quit emailing to go to an actual business meeting, but don’t worry, it doesn’t last long. He’s soon interrupted by Taylor, who has some bad news: Leila broke into his apartment and tried to kill herself. Grey is astonished at this news, because he got an EMAIL from Leila SEVEN MONTHS ago and she seemed totally fine then. Wow. He has Taylor prepare his private jet so that he can fly home straight away, but seems more concerned about Mrs Jones and the apartment than Leila’s actual suicide attempt. (M: Because it has to be a mistake! She was fine seven months ago, duh.)
Grey calls Ana and tells her he won’t make it to dinner tonight, then calls Ros to bitch about the heat in Savannah a bit. Then he does some work on the flight ‘to distract myself from the problem waiting at home’. Such compassion. Once his plane lands he gets a taxi to the hospital, and thinks this:
‘I have to see Leila and find out what the hell is going on. As we near the hospital my anger surfaces. Why would she do this to me?’
Yep. This is how Christian Grey reacts to the news of a suicidal ex-girlfriend. This is one of those rare times where we get some ACTUAL new content in this book, and Grey once again manages to out-awful himself in ways we never imagined possible.
J: No, I was wrong earlier. THIS is what infuriated me most about this entire chapter. ELJ goddamn topped it a few pages. My mouth literally dropped open at ‘why would she do this to me.’ Wow. Just … wow.
Mari: “Why would she kill herself… to me.” — Christian Grey
Alex: At the hospital, Grey has an angry exchange with a nurse who is one of the 0.00001% of women who don’t instantly fall in love with him. She won’t let him in to see Leila, so he just pushes past her and finds one on the 99.9999% instead in the form of a ‘young nurse’. He claims to be Leila’s brother while flashing her his ‘brightest smile’, and then shoots her a flirty wink when she gives him the information she needs. Well, that’s totally appropriate behaviour for someone apparently searching for his mentally ill sister.
Grey is shown to a waiting room in the Behavioural Health ward, where a doctor delivers some bad news: Leila has run away. Grey pauses to think that the doctor looks too young to be a psychiatrist. Shut up, you condescending wankstain. The doctor doesn’t have anything else useful to tell Grey, so he gets going and refuses to even give the hospital Leila’s next of kin details. What. A. Dick.
J: Um, I also realized here, he says he’s her brother and so everyone calls him Mr. Reed. But when he’s asking his people to look into her, he says she’s Leila Reed nee Williams, meaning her family name is Williams, so her brother should be Mr. Williams. I know it’s not big in the terms of things here, but I’m feeling vindictive and wanted to point it out… Carry on.
Alex: Outside, Grey calls his dodgy PI and asks him to track Leila down. It’s raining out there, and Grey thinks ‘It’s been a stressful afternoon, but at least the rain is a refreshing relief from the heat in Savannah’.
FANTASTIC news. I’m SO HAPPY FOR YOU, CHRISTIAN. Your ex-girlfriend just tried to kill herself, and is now missing somewhere in Seattle in goodness-knows-what kind of state, but I’m just SO RELIEVED to hear that you’re not too hot any more after your ‘stressful afternoon’.
Later on, Mrs Jones makes him dinner and cleans up after him. By the way, Mrs Jones was the one who witnessed Leila’s suicide attempt and accompanied her to the hospital. You might think that this would earn her an evening off, but I guess not.
After dinner, Grey heads into his study and pulls out Leila’s ‘file’ to look for clues. Because of course he has a Leila File. He decides against contacting her parents to tell them what’s happened, because it might alarm them, and OH MY GOD, THAT IS SO NOT YOUR DECISION TO MAKE!!! I AM GOING TO BREAK MY CAPS LOCK KEY ANY MINUTE NOW.
Now he gets an email from Ana, and gets all giddy about the fact that she put an ‘x’ at the end. They exchange some flirty emails about how they’re totally going to Do It again soon. DUDE. Did you forget that YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND JUST TRIED TO KILL HERSELF AND IS NOW MISSING AND oh, forget it. The chapter’s nearly over and I’m all out of rage now. In amongst the sexy emails is a mention of Christian’s ‘cat’ which, if you’ll recall, sparked a whole wave of Questionable Google Searches last time around. Ana’s emails eventually cease and he guesses that she’s gone to sleep. The chapter ends with Grey telling us that he feels better now. Well, that makes one of us.
Baby Count: 7
Trauma Flashback: Ah, hell, just check out the recap.
Next time on Grey: Grey thinks about Leila for about 0.2 more seconds on Friday June 3, 2011.
I'm a thirty-year-old postgrad living in Scotland. When I'm not writing (which, between my degree and Snark Squad, is almost never) I watch entirely too much TV, and live in constant fear of the day that I run out of things to watch.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a chronic book nerd and love storytelling in all forms. I'm particularly excited by the rise of the television show as an art form with long, cinematically beautiful plots and complex character arcs (I also watch cartoons). My travels in the past handful of years have led me through three continents and most recently landed me among the majestic mountains of Colorado. Some day I will compile all my travel journals/blogs into one place. Some day. Until then, you can find me with craft beer in hand, ready at any moment to deeply and passionately discuss survival tactics for the zombie apocalypse.
