Fifty Shades of Tedious Fuckery 2 (Vol. 6)
Taylor is cool.
Ana stands around in the foyer after Christian barges into the apartment, despite his security team not being finished sweeping the place, and as soon as Sawyer informs Taylor via radio that the boss has entered the place, he has to pull out his earpiece because Taylor is shouting so much. What did he say?! Give us some Taylor POV, come onnn!
While Ana is tooling around outside, she suddenly notices that the foyer is decorated with sixteen Madonna and child paintings, which sounds like something you'd definitely notice the first time you were there because it's fucking creepy.
Christian comes out the front door, announcing that it's all clear and then a few lines later says that Taylor and his team are checking all the closets and cupboards in the place for Leila. So, it's actually the opposite of all clear then, seeing as THEY'RE STILL LOOKING. But he sends Ana off to bed anyway. For fuck's sake Christian. And apparently there's no need to call the police about any of this, because that would mean this stupid subplot would be over and done with and where's the fun in that.
Ana wakes up later that night and sees a shadow at the end of her bed, which is possibly a woman. When she turns on the light, there's nothing there so she decides she imagined it. She finds Christian on the phone in his study and he looks so tired that her "heart constricts". Her heart constricts five times in this book and I'm starting to wonder if she has some kind of medical condition.
Instead of telling him about the figure she thought she saw in the bedroom, considering that there was very possibly an intruder in the house earlier, Ana spends half a page taking off Christian's shirt. They move into the bedroom, where the balcony door has been left open, although neither of them opened it and only then it occurs to Ana to tell Christian what she saw. He immediately summons Taylor, tells him to find Leila and to book them in somewhere for the night. Christian packs a bag for himself and stops Ana from going to get her own clothes, apparently she has to make do with wearing his t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, until Taylor hands her a suitcase of clothes that he packed for her, because TAYLOR IS AWESOME.
As they're leaving, Ana hugs Taylor for the suitcase and for generally being the only likeable character in this series, so OF COURSE Christian frowns and "then looks questioningly at Taylor, who smiles very slightly and adjusts his tie."
Christian and Ana get into the car and head for the hotel that they've been booked into for the night and when Ana wonders how Leila knew the Audi was hers, Christian reveals that he bought an Audi A3 for all his submissives. Lovely. Also, while they're on the way, "Christian roars up Fifth Avenue toward the I-5", but I presume E.L. James means that the car he's driving did the roaring. Otherwise Christian is sitting there going "RAAARR!" with Ana next to him.
They get to the hotel and the receptionist stutters and blushes at the sight of Christian, which is how every woman seems to react to him and allows Ana to bitch about every female they encounter for eyeing up HER abusive asshole boyfrenn. (Also, Ana bestows the name Miss Flushing Crimson upon her. Because of course she does.)
Once they're in the fancy suite, they drink some brandy and bone on the four poster bed. The next morning, Christian wakes Ana up because Dr. Greene is on her way over. Even if you're on the run from a psychotic ex, there's always time for forced contraceptives! They have breakfast (YOU MUST EAT, ANA) and Christian gets narky with Ana when she jokes about whether they'll be safe wherever they're going that day. "Fifty doesn't joke about my safety - I should know this by now." To be fair though, this is also the guy who put her to bed the previous night before his apartment was fully searched for a crazy stalker.
Also, I'd just like to point out that when Christian gets cross here, "his mouth presses in a line". It happens a lot. Sometimes it's a "grim line", mostly a "hard line" and he does it 25 times in this book, which leads me to believe that he looks like this most of the time:
Dr. Greene arrives and tells Ana that she might be pregnant because she stopped taking her pill when she left Christian and makes her do a pregnancy test, despite the fact that they've been using condoms since getting back together. Oh and she waits until AFTER the pregnancy test to ask Ana when her last period was. She doesn't seem like a very good doctor, to be honest. Way to unnecessarily freak out your patient. (Ana isn't pregnant of course, although I could have told her that.) After that though, Ana doesn't listen to a word the doctor says about the injection she's going to give her because she's too busy thinking about how terrible it would be to have to tell Christian she was pregnant. Even though she isn't. And then she proceeds to be all weird with Christian and it doesn't really make any sense because you'd think she'd be super relieved to not be pregnant, but instead she's in bad form.
She eventually tells Christian what Dr. Greene said and when he's also relieved that she's not pregnant she gets all snappy with him and when he points out that she's in a bad temper, he says:
"My natural inclination is to beat it out of you, but I seriously doubt you want that."
WHAT AN AMAZING GUY.
They take a shower together and he gets Ana to carefully wash off the lipstick lines on his torso, which seem to have survived numerous sex scenes and the charity event at his parents house. He could do with taking more showers, really. Ana starts crying because he's so SAD and BROKEN and then Christian says overwrought things like "I'm a husk of a man. I don't have a heart."
Then, after loads of build-up, he tells Ana that he loves her (well, she says "You love me" and he says "Yes I do") and it's all framed to be this huge deal but at this stage I'm just like GOD. WHATEVER. NEXT.
The following two pages are then taken up with Ana drying Christian off with a towel and telling us how AMAZING and WONDERFUL everything is now.
Gazing at us both in the mirror - his beauty, his nakedness and me with my covered hair - we look almost Biblical, as if from an Old Testament baroque painting.
This line is actually hilarious, because Old Testament paintings are dark as hell. In fact, if you Google "Old Testament baroque painting", the image results consist almost entirely of murder scenes and severed heads. Seriously, try it. It's a bloodbath. A chiaroscuro Caravaggio bloodbath.
More banging ensues, but thankfully we're spared the details due to a paragraph break. While they're lying in bed afterwards, Ana asks Christian if he knows anything about his biological father, but he doesn't. Although he does know that it wasn't his mother's pimp and then reveals that the pimp discovered his mother's body and just left Christian there with her until the cops came, and then he breezily changes the subject. Apparently Christian has a surprise for Ana, so he tells her to get dressed and her inner goddess swoons while Christian walks around in his boxers.
Speaking of which, let's check in with Ana's inner goddess, shall we? She makes a massive 56 appearances in this book, so I'll just list the dumbest ones.
She:
is down on bended knee with her hands clasped in supplication
strokes her chin gently in quiet contemplation
cheers loudly to the rafters
is doing a triple axel dismount off the uneven bars
does three backflips over the gym floor
purrs with pure pleasure
has found her voice and is shouting from the rooftops
performs a perfect triple Salchow in her ice skates
jerks awake suddenly, all disheveled with a just-fucked look
is bouncing around like a five year old
tackles Ana's subconscious to the floor
performs a quick arabesque
stomps off pouting, her arms crossed like an angry toddler
is limbering up in the background, doing her floor exercises
grabs a rose between her teeth and starts to tango (I'm pretty sure you need more than one person for that. Idioms don't come out of nowhere, like.)
backflips over her chaise longue
is clapping her hands in glee like a small child
pouts provocatively
pops her head out of her bunker
is draped in a pink feather boa and diamonds, strutting her stuff in fuck-me shoes
is on her knees, naked except for her panties - begging
fist pumps the air above her chaise longue
performs four arabesques and a pas de basque
has resurfaced after her evening of rocking and weeping in the corner and she's wearing harlot-red lipstick
somersaults round her chaise longue
is stripped naked and standing in line, ready and waiting
has already scissor-kicked onto the table and is watching him with adoration
It turns out most of them are dumb so that's almost every appearance. I left out all the ones where she's writhing on her chaise longue, because that happened a lot and got boring FAST. The chaise longue alone makes ten appearances for fuck's sake. Unfortunately a piano doesn't get dropped on her fucking head at any point.
Ana's subconscious manages to put in an impressive 52 appearances but spends most of them hissing and snarling and glaring at Ana and has an armchair instead of a chaise longue. She's the half moon glasses-wearing buzzkill to the inner goddess' fun-loving idiot sex pixie.
And both of them can fuck right off.