Previously: Christian Grey upped his own stalker game by buying the company where Ana works. Ana briefly expressed valid, genuine concern, but then he smiled at her and she reverted to the spineless, gutless waste of words we all know and hate.
Sweeney: The chapter begins at the end of the sex scene from the last chapter. These chapters are literally separated mid-fuck. Grey is smiling, but Ana’s internal monologue is brooding. Ana confirms my belief that it couldn’t possibly be the unappealing sex, but Grey’s buying shiny things that keeps her in this abusive relationship. He makes some comment about having missed “this” meaning “being inside her” and Ana says, “Thank you for the iPad.” Priorities, yo.
He “jokingly” calls her a wench and orders her to make him food, but Christian Grey jokes generally fail due to his history of actual abuse of literally every kind imaginable, including a few I would never have otherwise thought of. She’s all LOLZOK and scrambles out of bed, probably just to piss me off. Seriously, though: she has only ever gotten out of bed by “clambering” or “scrambling.” I think scramble irritates me more than clamber. I know all about being clumsy and awkward, but how the fuck is an able-bodied person so inept as to have such apparent difficulty with getting out of bed? I don’t even know how to visualize this. Is she throwing sheets about the room in the process?
Sorry, I’m just stalling because I don’t want to go back to reading. Grey finds her abducticopter balloon and it’s a big sentimental moment.
Lorraine: Sleeping with a deflated mylar balloon: sentimental or a suffocation hazard?
Sweeney: It would put all of us out of our collective misery, wouldn’t it? Anyway, he cooks dinner and they eat it on Kate’s Persian rug.
Lorraine:
“He’s wearing his jeans and his shirt, and that’s all.“
He’s totally naked!!! (Except the part where he’s not.)
Sweeney: That’s another popular bit of Ana-speak. We should have kept a count on the number of times he was totally-naked-but-not. It’s too late now because I won’t go back and read it to find out, but that would have been nice.
They talk about Ana’s past and her mom’s ex-husband Steve and why Ana came to live with Ray, who Ana apparently took care of. The idea of a fictional character more useless/inept than Ana truly cannot be possible. I do not believe it for a second.
The conversation starts out in “I don’t get the appeal because this is boring,” territory but quickly moves into that familiar, “Holy hell, I hate everyone who helped bring this book into being,” neighborhood. Grey tells her that he wants to take care of her (but in his creepy, possessive way) and she tells him that he has a weird way of going about it and says she’s still mad about him buying the company. Really, Ana? Are you really? Because that’s not clear after you expressed discontent for about .2 seconds before saying, “Nevermind, let’s have sex and I’ll make you dinner!”
Grey’s response? “I know but you being mad, baby, wouldn’t stop me.” What a charmer.
Lorraine: Things That Will Not Stop Christian Grey:
“No.”
Anger.
A break-up.
Physical Distance.
Sweeney: Aaand the conversation actually gets worse: Ana asks what she should tell her co-workers and boss. As usual, he gets extra murdery when Jack/James is mentioned. I’m trying to decide whether that weird ass incident at the bar constitutes the baseball-game-of-noms-denial in this story. Grey outright tells Ana that YES, he will buy all future companies Ana works for if she leaves this one.
Guys, I really don’t even have words for this. What in the actual fuck am I reading? There’s the unspeakable rage, but then there’s just confusion because I can’t comprehend how this book is a thing.
Lor: Ana calls this a “no-win situation” but really she should go work for Google or Apple. TRY AND BUY ME NOW, MOTHER FUCKER. Or, you know, run for your life.
Sweeney: Also, we get more business talk written by a five-year-old with a thesaurus. Grey tells Ana not to mention to Jack that Grey owns the company now and adds, “The heads of agreement was signed yesterday. The news is embargoed for four weeks while the management at SIP makes some changes.” This leads me to believe that much/all of SIP will soon be placed in the incompetent hands of Anastasia Steele. Fictional stock holders should sell their shares now.
Ana says that Christian is being “a tad over-protective” which I would call an insane understatement to do “a tad” but is actually just completely false because “protection” would place a great distance between Ana and Grey. That ends the conversation, because that’s all the backbone Ana can muster for now.
They decide it’s time for dessert and Ana’s Inner Goddess makes a brief appearance to be disappointed that it’s not Ana. (Ew.) It’s VANILLA ice cream, because LOL THEY’RE SO FUNNY, Y’ALL. “Well, Anastasia, my new motto is if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Ana can’t believe he said that and neither can I. Guys, did he just intentionally make a domestic violence joke?
Lor: HE DID SWEENEY. The best part is when you actually take him seriously for a second and consider that this is his version of “join ’em.” Like, oh, my girlfriend doesn’t want me to beat her so I’m going to do stuff like buy her company like normal guys.
NO GREY. NO FOREVER.
Sweeney: We move directly from this into sexytimes chat. I’m so unsettled that not even a reprisal of my favorite unintentional joke of E. L. James, the George Takei “Oh my,” can cheer me up. This time it’s even been modified to “Oh fucking my,” which, all right, yes, made me giggle when I thought of George Takei saying it. But it was a laugh tainted by sickening feelings of guilt over what I’m reading.
Ana and Christian go back into the bedroom with the ice cream and asks if she has a change of sheets. PLEASE DON’T. PLEASE DON’T RUIN ICE CREAM. You’ve already destroyed Popsicles. I think these books are going to be the cure for all of my dietary struggles. As expected, they ruin ice cream. It’s fairly predictable: he ties her up, and starts pouring ice cream all over her to consume from her body. The fact that this sex is happening between Ana and Grey makes it wholly unappealing. He interjects some Christian Grey commanding/condescending bullshit about how she needs to be still or else get ice cream all over the sheets. Pretty sure that’s an inevitable outcome of this game, hence the need to ask about the sheets in the first place.
Lor: My favorite part about this SEX SCENE is when Ana comments on the “energy-saving bulbs” in her room. That right there is an A+ useless detail, my friends. A mother fucking +.
Sweeney: Right after he ties her up, Ana sees him visibly relax and assumes it’s because now he doesn’t have to worry about her touching him and how none of the other subs ever would have been able to touch him and that’s why he needs his rules and blah blah whatever. This little snippet is meant to make you feel that Christian Grey is only a psychopath because he’s so tortured and that you should feel some sort of sympathy for him. Nope. Not working.
The writing is just awkward and stilted in a way that would make it wholly unsexy, even if it were sex between two characters that don’t make me want to vomit. The scene includes brilliant lines like: “My inner goddess is doing a triple axel dismount off the uneven bars, and abruptly my mouth is dry.” I’m mentioning this line solely because our friend Ginny emailed us about this when she was reading, before she wrote her own mini-rant-blog-post about this line. Short version: YO, YOU ARE MIXING UP YOUR SPORTS. That line is a weird clusterfuck of ice skating and gymnastics and makes no sense.
Lor: I do recommend picturing someone in ice skates jumping off a high bar though. I giggled.
Sweeney: Grey can’t orgasm without declaring ownership of the women he abuses, so we get another, “YOU. ARE. MINE.” conversation. Ana, as expected, doesn’t take much issue with the sick extremes to which Grey takes this ownership thing:
“This is what he does to me—takes my body and possesses it wholly so that I think of nothing but him. His magic is powerful, intoxicating. I’m a butterfly caught in his net, unable and unwilling to escape. I’m his . . . totally his.”
I hate her.
After sex (btw: they orgasm simultaneously, because she’s “like a sorcerer’s apprentice.” This book snarks itself, really.) Grey invites her to a family charity thing the next day. Ana has nothing to wear, because she never buys clothes and only re-wears that skanknasty dress of Kate’s allthetimealways. Grey asks that she not be mad before pointing out that he still has the clothes he bought her at his house. She doesn’t argue because she doesn’t want to fight, but really, the breakup hardly lasted long enough for him to do anything about the closet full of clothes.
Lor: Christian Grey logic: DON’T BE MAD: I didn’t throw away clothes I bought. I DON’T CARE IF YOU ARE MAD: I bought the company you work for to stalk you.
Yeah, hookay.
Sweeney: Ana has a weird nightmare about The Ghost of Submissives Past, in which Ana is now the sickly pale one and the other girl is wearing her clothes. GSP is happy and healthy and now she’s the one who has no idea who Ana is. This terrifies Ana and she wakes up screaming and scares Christian.
She tells him about the nightmare and her run-in with GSP, and in spite of her mega-vague description of the girl and Grey’s supposedly long list of prior conquests, he instantly knows who the girl is. Her name is Leila, but we’re not ever going to call her that. She is apparently the one responsible for putting “Toxic” on Christian Grey’s iPod. PSH, WHATEVER. YOU KNOW YOU LOVE BRITNEY. Also, I will remind everyone that communicating serious feelings and relationship problems via the music of popstars is not acceptable behavior for anyone who has cleared puberty.
I’ll spare you Ana’s initial obsessive freak out about the fact that this girl probably had A CONTRACT and could give Grey WHAT HE NEEDS except not because I just summarized it for you anyway. Grey gets out of bed at 5am to call some mystery person about this GSP situation. Ana has to beg Grey to tell her anything and the conversation basically consists of him telling her one sentence followed by a whole lot of “PLEASE!” and oh-so-tense silences, because this is the E. L. James version of building suspense.
GSP showed up while Ana was in Georgia and said some shit to the housekeeper before slicing her wrists open, hence the bandages Ana saw.
Lor: He says, “she made a haphazard attempt to open a vein,” which is the dumbest way ever to say she tried to kill herself.
Sweeney: As a general rule, these characters like to look for the most annoying ways to say pretty much everything. Or it just comes to them naturally. The housekeeper got GSP to the hospital, but she checked herself out before Christian could get to her. He has since done his stalkerdarndest to get to her to “get her help” but has not succeeded.
There’s more to this story, but let’s pause a minute to recap: his ex-domestic-abuse-victim tries to fucking kill herself over him and like 48 hours later he’s beating the shit out of Ana? Does nobody who reads this book follow this bit of timeline? These things are individually awful, but when you place this information back into context, it makes me physically ill. This character is seriously deranged and falls in an entirely different category from the other kinds of fictional-love-interests that I find annoyingly over-hyped because this is just warped. Women of the world obsessing over these books: what the fuck is wrong with you?
Lor: A+
Sweeney: Continuing: it turns out that GSP is married now. Grey is offended when Ana assumes that he had been with her while she was married, but no. (Lor: Seriously. Mrs. Rape was married…) They ended it two or three years ago when she wanted an actual relationship and he just wanted to keep beating her up. She jumped immediately into a marriage with someone else, which is a fair portrait of the kind of emotional stability I’d expect from a Christian Grey victim. She ran out on the husband four months ago and has only recently started showing up on the outskirts of Christian’s life again, which he assumes is because of Ana. I have no more things to say about this, except that I wish I didn’t have shit to do tomorrow, so I could drink away the horror.
Finally: throughout all of this, Ana periodically thinks about how the girl looks just fucking like her. I once dated a guy whose ex-girlfriend looked, based on the one picture I saw of her, eerily like me. Knowing that he wasn’t actually over that relationship, this realization was only one of many, “This isn’t really going anywhere,” bullet points. Ana, you are in an intensely abusive mindfuck of a relationship with a guy who has been in prior intensely abusive mindfuck relationships with girls who look like your emaciated ghost twins and have recently attempted suicide because they never received proper professional help from the fallout of that mindfuck of a relationship.
Now that you know this, girl, what are you going to do? What do you think she does, dear readers? THEY HAVE SEX. Yes, that’s right, we go immediately from this totally epic serious conversation and the four thousandth HOLY SHIT DANGER RED FLAG moment to sex. Christian actually says “Forget about her” and Ana’s all, “Good plan.” Inner Goddess makes an appearance do a bunch of back flips.
I hope you forgive me as I glaze over the rest of the chapter, because a girl can only take so much. They wake up and have more sex. They get dressed and talk about personal trainers, so that Ana can be fit enough to keep up with him (a side of “your body’s not good enough” emotional abuse).
Lor: He mentions that he trains with a kickboxing “ex-Olympic contender.” In case you were wondering, kickboxing is not actually an Olympic sport, much like gymnastical-figure-skating is also not a sport. Sorry EL. 0/2.
Sweeney: Inner Goddess is back on her chaise lounge at the thought of going back into the Red Room of Domestic Violence. I’m only including that for those of you still playing the Snark Squad Fifty Shades of Liver Damage Drinking Game.
Ana agrees to meet with the personal trainer and then they start making plans for the day. She needs to deposit the check (“bank a check” she keeps saying, one of a millionty “Americans don’t say that” examples) and buy a new car. This leads to another, “DON’T BE MAD, BUT…” conversation, due to their break-up having lasted 8 seconds. The Audi, of course, has already been brought back to Ana’s building by Taylor. They fight. She tries to make him take the check back in exchange for the car, but he refuses. She rips it up. His counter-move? He calls and has $24,000 direct deposited into her account. GUYS. THIS BOOK. THIS FUCKING BOOK.
She asks him how he knows her bank account number, because she apparently still hasn’t clued in. His answer is exactly what we all would have guessed: “I know everything about you, Anastasia.” Or, rather, half of what I would have guessed, because I would have added; my version continued, “Because I am a stalker and a lunatic who will probably murder you in your sleep.”
They argue about the actual cost of the car and then they make out. In Ana’s own words: “I acquiesce and just like that, our fight is over.” So, ladies, that’s the big relationship advice from this book. Your stalkerific creepy boyfriend is always right and if you just roll over and take it acquiesce all will be well!
They go to breakfast and Grey gets pissy about her paying for it. They walk up the street to a salon of Christian’s choosing, where the woman asks Grey if it’ll be the usual. Ana then remembers the rules: a salon, waxing. She’s already agreed to the trainer, leading her to conclude that he’s introducing the rules by stealth. Offering her use of his own personal trainer and taking her to a salon aren’t inherently creepy things, but the way he pushes the former and the fact that he has taken a line of ex-subs to the latter is fucking weird. Furthermore, this salon is one of three that he owns, adding to the Christian Grey Empire of Domestic Violence Emporiums.
Lor: Complete with condom manufacturing branch. Better safe than sorry!
Sweeney: While waiting for the stylist to be ready, Grey spots someone he recognizes and goes to talk to her. She is older, blonde, and gorgeous. At first Ana is intrigued, but then she KNOWS “deep down in [her] gut on a visceral level” that it’s none other than MRS. RAPE.
Murmur Count – 7
Whisper Count – 12
Favorite comment last post: “I wonder if Christian has a manager for all the businesses he’s purchased in relation to people he likes to beat the shit out of and then condemn for forgetting safe words, otherwise known as “girlfriends.” Seriously, this guy has to have about 30 companies under his thumb that are purely related to some twit he’s fucked. And does this Manager of Stalker Companies also manage all the other random purchases Moneybags de Sade makes? Like every single portrait that Josecob had in his gallery? Also, does this person expedite the process of purchasing a company? Because I’m fairly certain you can’t just walk in and go “Hi, my abused moron of a girlfriend works here. I’ll pay you anything you want so that I can track her every move and ensure that her boss will get fired should he even hint at her being pretty, despite the fact I enjoy knocking her around a bit and forcing her to have sex in boat-houses or any other time where she says no.” -Nikki
Next time on Fifty Shades Darker: Ana meets Mrs. Rape. Find out how that uncomfortable that is in FSD – Chapter 5.
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
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.
