I Recap Chapter 9 of Fifty Shades Darker
We left off with Christian's admission of love for Ana in the shower. It was romantic, really romantic.
"You love me," I whisper.
His eyes widen further and his mouth opens. He takes a huge breath, as if winded. He looks tortured--vulnerable.
"Yes," he whispers. "I do."
Chapter 9 begins with a mere three paragraphs about Ana's "jubilation," dashed with a helping of red flags.
This beautiful, fucked-up man, whom I once thought of as my romantic hero--strong, solitary, mysterious--possesses all these traits, but he's also fragile and alienated and full of self-loathing. My heart swells with joy but also pain for his suffering. And I know in this moment that my heart is big enough for both of us. I hope it's big enough for both of us.
"Strong, solitary, and mysterious" sounds like the back cover of a gay porn.
Andy is a college senior who's never come out of the closet. Mr. Grey is the strong, solitary, and mysterious professor who's going to teach him how....to come, that is!
Seriously, when I read that description, all I could think of was The Rock writing a personal ad.
This is to say nothing of his flaws, "fragile," "alienated," and "full of self-loathing." How is 'alienated' a flaw? And how the flying fuck does it apply to Christian? Christian Grey, the billionaire at the center of a loving family, a colossal corporation, and an army of personal servants- alienated? By whom? Bah.
I reach up to clasp his dear, handsome face and kiss him gently, pouring all the love I feel into this one sweet connection. I want to devour him beneath the hot cascading water. Christian groans and encircles me in his arms, holding me as if I am the air he needs to breathe."
"Oh, Ana," he whispers hoarsely. "I want you, but not here."
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHH. THE SHOWER ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH ANYMORE! For those of you playing Sex Bingo along at home, "shower" has already been checked off. There's some foreplay where she dries him with a towel, then - THANK GOD - they fade to black. I'm pretty sure that's the first time we've done that. Probably, EL James realized she was going to have to top shower sex since Christian just snubbed it for no reason, was way too lazy to either do so or change the line, and decided to fuck it. Fuck it all, if you've made it this far in the Fifty Shades trilogy, you're either not in it for the writing or you're only here to poke fun.
How astute of you, Miss James.
We fade back in for another round of Fucked-Up Pillow Talk.
"So hungry for information, Anastasia," he sighs, shaking his head. "The pimp discovered the crack whore's body and phoned it in to the authorities. Took him four days to make the discovery, though. He shut the door when he left...left me with her...her body."
I CALL BULLSHIT.
Even though crack whores don't have pimps, because the point of a pimp is to make money off a prostitute by protecting her, and crack whores don't 'ho for money, only crack, hence the name, I'll let that slide. But a pimp who leaves one of his 'hos alone for FOUR DAYS? Bitch, what the hell are you thinking? That's his MONEY. He's not about to let it sit and smoke up his profit in a cloud of freebased cocaine.
I'm purposely not going to discuss this book's treatment of drug addiction (ignore the pun), because it angers me too much. The very fact that they refer to her as "the crack whore," tells me the author is a judgemental cunt with absolutely no compassion for anyone but herself, with literally no interest in learning the first thing about addiction before mis-representing it in her shitty, shitty fanfiction/book.
Huh, judgemental, dumb, and cunt-y... that could be Ana's porn character.
So Christian distracts Ana with a surprise like the creepy uncle he is, and we get a telling insight into Ana's idea of love.
As we dress, I notice that we move with the synchronization of two people who know each other well, each watchful and acutely aware of the other, exchanging the occasional shy smile and sweet touch.
I get that we have to ignore the fact that Ana and Christian have only known each other for three weeks or so. That's a suspension of disbelief I can live with, given that Beauty and the Beast fully fell in love over the course of 2 musical interludes. Miss James's pacing is atrocious (In one Sunday we're treated to vanilla sex, kinky sex, melodrama, make-up sex, family dinner, punishment sex, and a gynecological visit) but three weeks isn't a terribly short amount of time by romance novel standards.
What does bother me is that she describes the way they get dressed as what she imagines a long-standing and comfortable relationship would look like. This irks me, because I am in a very long-standing and comfortable relationship, and let me tell you how this goes:
1. We have to leave in 30 minutes, and I am in bathroom, doing my make-up. He is asleep. I pause to wake him up and make him coffee. He drinks it while playing a video game.
2. I'm ten minutes behind because of the coffee, and he's dressed with 15 minutes to go. He knocks on the door. When I yell that I'm on the mascara (he knows that's the last thing) he goes back to his video game, because he also knows that I'm lying.
3. Five minutes later, I'm done. I grab my purse and badger him until he turns off World of Warcraft, and watch as he pats his pockets, looking for his keys.
4. I find his keys and his wallet.
5. We make it to the car with 2 minutes to spare when he realizes that he's left his license inside.
6. We leave 10 minutes late.
Every time. That's two people who know each other well. Touching each other and smiling while getting dressed is actually the exact opposite, because you're losing time with the googly-eyes and purple inner monologue.
I am absolutely baffled by the "synchronization" line. Are we supposed to buy that when he's buttoning his jeans, she's buttoning her jeans, and that when he's tying his shoelaces, she's tying her shoelaces? And how is that romantic? Maybe I'm being a crotchety old curmudgeon, but you can't have both the new-relationship love bubble bliss AND the old-relationship comfort and synchronicity.
Also, Ana lets her battered wife flag fly high:
No one should look this good. And I don't know if it's the momentary distraction of his perfect looks or the knowledge that he loves me, but his threat no longer fills me with dread. This is my Fify Shades. This is the way he is.
One of the nice things about my job is that we use Wite-Out alot, and have an overabundance of the nifty hand-held kind that actually put little strips of sticky paper down on the mistake instead of paint (from were I'm sitting, I can see 196 of them) so no one cares that I use mine to white out every single time Ana makes a reference to "my Fifty," "fifty shades", "Oh, blah-blah Fifty," and now a good portion of my copy is pleasantly blank.
On the way out to the surprise, Ana shows some more contempt for the working class.
The valet zooms up in Christian's car, wearing an enormous grin. Jeez, everyone is so happy today.
"Great car, sir," he mumbles as he hands over the keys. Christian winks and gives him an obscenely large tip.
I frown at him. Honestly.
Why is no one but Ana allowed to be happy? Why aren't they allowed to be good at their jobs or, at the very least, professional? Instead, we get an endless string of nervous receptionists, anxious marketing executives (remember that one? from the Heathman, way back at the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey?), stuttering waitresses, and mumbling valets?
And why in the name of all that is holy is Ana angry with Christian for using his own money to tip a service person who performed a service? Service and a smile? I like how Ana has to tell us that she doesn't care about money, then repeatedly uses her boyfriend's wealth as a weapon against people she feels are beneath her. This is why she's going to be one of those old rich people that everybody hates. Her staff is going to want to stab her in her sleep. OMG, I want them to visit the Grey mansion and for Gretchen to poison her tea. Her stupid foreign tea.
Christian takes Ana to her surprise, which is shopping for a new car. The Submissive Special is ruined, clearly, because it was drenched in white paint and the tires were slashed. Financially, it makes more sense to buy a new car than to fix these things. Right.
Ana convinces us that's she not spoiled some more, and then hates on the car salesman. This fucking girl.
I resign myself to my fate. A Saab? Do I want a Saab? I quite liked the Audi Submissive Special.
STFU AND DIAF, as my friends over at ohaidesk would say. (Check out their LJ! Fifty Shades recaps galore!)
Troy Turniansky, the salesman, is all over Fifty like a cheap suit. He can smell a sale.
Later, she mentions that "he's smarmy, too."
ANA. YOU ARE GETTING YOUR SECOND FREE CAR IN TWO WEEKS. SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH AND TRY TO BE THE LEAST BIT GRATEFUL.
Godfuckingdamnit, I hate her. ANGRY BLOGGER IS ANGRY.
We do get of the lulz when EL James tries to write in gearhead, though.
"Sir, the 9-3? I've located one at our Bevery Hills dealership. We can have it here for you in a couple of days." Troy glows with triumph.
"Top of the range?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hey Mr. Ford, do you have that Mustang GT for me?"
"I sure do, just gotta fly it in from Detroit."
"And that's the A+ version, right? The state-of-the-art model with unicorn interior?"
"Yes, sir."
After buying a car, Ana and Christian go to a bar called SP's Place, a name carefully designed to fuck with the speech-impaired, and when Ana meets the bartender, blatant racism ensues.
He's black and beautiful, his dark eyes assessing me and not finding me wanting, it seems. One large diamond stud winks at me from his ear. I like him immediately.
So, you know, she is NOT RACIST. Because she's met two black people so far, and she's LIKED THEM BOTH VERY MUCH. For the record, whenever a Jack Hyde checks Ana out, it's disgusting. But a black guy, now there's a compliment. Headdesk and facepalm.
After buying a car and drinking at a bar, the next logical step is to spend the day on Christian's special boat. Behold, the powers of three minutes spent on Wikipedia.
Holy cow. It must be at least forty, maybe fifty feet. Two sleek white hulls, a deck, a roomy cabin, and towering overhead an impressive maste. I know nothing about boats, but I can tell this one is special.
Well, knock me over with a feather. A deck?
Christian displays his dickish powers of pretention once again.
"Built by my company," he says proudy, and my heart swells. "She's been designed from the ground up by the very best naval architects in the world and constructed here in Seattle at my yard. She has hybrid electric drives, asymmetric dagger boards, a square-topped mainsail--"
Why does her heart swell because his company built the boat? P.S., let's add "building boats" to the list of things Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. does, because beauty salons, publishing houses, food-drops in Africa, and my God I don't even remember the rest, wasn't far-fetched enough.
And why the fuck would he need the best naval architects in the world? What purpose do they serve? Is the boat commissioned by the US Navy during times of war? Don't those architects have something better to do than pander to people with too much money on their hands? And what's this about "my yard"? Christian owns a shipyard?
Why the fuck not.
When they leave the marina, this happens:
Behind us, a small crowd has gathered on the dockside to watch our depature. Small children are waving, and I wave back.
For some reason, I'm getting the feeling that EL James watched Titanic right before writing this chapter. Ana even drives the boat, which is totally cool, because you don't need a license to do that. Oh, and I forgot-
He picks up the receiver and radios the coast guard as Mac calls up that we are set to go.
What the fuck does he need to call the coast guard for? Is this special boat so scary that they're gonna mistake it for a pirate ship?
We're rewarded for the nauseating cheese of this chapter with probably my favorite image in FSD.
He kisses me quickly, then steps off his captain's chair and bounds up to the front of the boat to join Mac, where he starts unfurling sails, untying ropes, and operating winches and pulleys. They work well together in a team, shouting various nautical terms to each other, and it's warming to see Fify interacting with someone else in such a carefree manner.
Did her internet crash or something? I'm doubled over laughing, imagining Christian in a ridiculous captain's hat and blue blazer with giant gold buttons, running haphazardly around a boat yelling "Port!", "Starboard!", and "HOIST THE MAINSAIL, SKIPPY!" while Mac, whose entire job is (apparently) to live on Christian's boat and help him sail it three or four times a year, chases him shouting, "Galley below!"
I'm in tears.
We end with some uninspiring sex on a boat.
My intrepid fingers move through his pubic hair to his erection, and I grasp him tightly.
That line sort of makes it sound like he has crabs.
"You love me," I whisper.
His eyes widen further and his mouth opens. He takes a huge breath, as if winded. He looks tortured--vulnerable.
"Yes," he whispers. "I do."
Chapter 9 begins with a mere three paragraphs about Ana's "jubilation," dashed with a helping of red flags.
This beautiful, fucked-up man, whom I once thought of as my romantic hero--strong, solitary, mysterious--possesses all these traits, but he's also fragile and alienated and full of self-loathing. My heart swells with joy but also pain for his suffering. And I know in this moment that my heart is big enough for both of us. I hope it's big enough for both of us.
"Strong, solitary, and mysterious" sounds like the back cover of a gay porn.
Andy is a college senior who's never come out of the closet. Mr. Grey is the strong, solitary, and mysterious professor who's going to teach him how....to come, that is!
Seriously, when I read that description, all I could think of was The Rock writing a personal ad.
This is to say nothing of his flaws, "fragile," "alienated," and "full of self-loathing." How is 'alienated' a flaw? And how the flying fuck does it apply to Christian? Christian Grey, the billionaire at the center of a loving family, a colossal corporation, and an army of personal servants- alienated? By whom? Bah.
I reach up to clasp his dear, handsome face and kiss him gently, pouring all the love I feel into this one sweet connection. I want to devour him beneath the hot cascading water. Christian groans and encircles me in his arms, holding me as if I am the air he needs to breathe."
"Oh, Ana," he whispers hoarsely. "I want you, but not here."
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHH. THE SHOWER ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH ANYMORE! For those of you playing Sex Bingo along at home, "shower" has already been checked off. There's some foreplay where she dries him with a towel, then - THANK GOD - they fade to black. I'm pretty sure that's the first time we've done that. Probably, EL James realized she was going to have to top shower sex since Christian just snubbed it for no reason, was way too lazy to either do so or change the line, and decided to fuck it. Fuck it all, if you've made it this far in the Fifty Shades trilogy, you're either not in it for the writing or you're only here to poke fun.
How astute of you, Miss James.
We fade back in for another round of Fucked-Up Pillow Talk.
"So hungry for information, Anastasia," he sighs, shaking his head. "The pimp discovered the crack whore's body and phoned it in to the authorities. Took him four days to make the discovery, though. He shut the door when he left...left me with her...her body."
I CALL BULLSHIT.
Even though crack whores don't have pimps, because the point of a pimp is to make money off a prostitute by protecting her, and crack whores don't 'ho for money, only crack, hence the name, I'll let that slide. But a pimp who leaves one of his 'hos alone for FOUR DAYS? Bitch, what the hell are you thinking? That's his MONEY. He's not about to let it sit and smoke up his profit in a cloud of freebased cocaine.
I'm purposely not going to discuss this book's treatment of drug addiction (ignore the pun), because it angers me too much. The very fact that they refer to her as "the crack whore," tells me the author is a judgemental cunt with absolutely no compassion for anyone but herself, with literally no interest in learning the first thing about addiction before mis-representing it in her shitty, shitty fanfiction/book.
Huh, judgemental, dumb, and cunt-y... that could be Ana's porn character.
So Christian distracts Ana with a surprise like the creepy uncle he is, and we get a telling insight into Ana's idea of love.
As we dress, I notice that we move with the synchronization of two people who know each other well, each watchful and acutely aware of the other, exchanging the occasional shy smile and sweet touch.
I get that we have to ignore the fact that Ana and Christian have only known each other for three weeks or so. That's a suspension of disbelief I can live with, given that Beauty and the Beast fully fell in love over the course of 2 musical interludes. Miss James's pacing is atrocious (In one Sunday we're treated to vanilla sex, kinky sex, melodrama, make-up sex, family dinner, punishment sex, and a gynecological visit) but three weeks isn't a terribly short amount of time by romance novel standards.
What does bother me is that she describes the way they get dressed as what she imagines a long-standing and comfortable relationship would look like. This irks me, because I am in a very long-standing and comfortable relationship, and let me tell you how this goes:
1. We have to leave in 30 minutes, and I am in bathroom, doing my make-up. He is asleep. I pause to wake him up and make him coffee. He drinks it while playing a video game.
2. I'm ten minutes behind because of the coffee, and he's dressed with 15 minutes to go. He knocks on the door. When I yell that I'm on the mascara (he knows that's the last thing) he goes back to his video game, because he also knows that I'm lying.
3. Five minutes later, I'm done. I grab my purse and badger him until he turns off World of Warcraft, and watch as he pats his pockets, looking for his keys.
4. I find his keys and his wallet.
5. We make it to the car with 2 minutes to spare when he realizes that he's left his license inside.
6. We leave 10 minutes late.
Every time. That's two people who know each other well. Touching each other and smiling while getting dressed is actually the exact opposite, because you're losing time with the googly-eyes and purple inner monologue.
I am absolutely baffled by the "synchronization" line. Are we supposed to buy that when he's buttoning his jeans, she's buttoning her jeans, and that when he's tying his shoelaces, she's tying her shoelaces? And how is that romantic? Maybe I'm being a crotchety old curmudgeon, but you can't have both the new-relationship love bubble bliss AND the old-relationship comfort and synchronicity.
Also, Ana lets her battered wife flag fly high:
No one should look this good. And I don't know if it's the momentary distraction of his perfect looks or the knowledge that he loves me, but his threat no longer fills me with dread. This is my Fify Shades. This is the way he is.
One of the nice things about my job is that we use Wite-Out alot, and have an overabundance of the nifty hand-held kind that actually put little strips of sticky paper down on the mistake instead of paint (from were I'm sitting, I can see 196 of them) so no one cares that I use mine to white out every single time Ana makes a reference to "my Fifty," "fifty shades", "Oh, blah-blah Fifty," and now a good portion of my copy is pleasantly blank.
On the way out to the surprise, Ana shows some more contempt for the working class.
The valet zooms up in Christian's car, wearing an enormous grin. Jeez, everyone is so happy today.
"Great car, sir," he mumbles as he hands over the keys. Christian winks and gives him an obscenely large tip.
I frown at him. Honestly.
Why is no one but Ana allowed to be happy? Why aren't they allowed to be good at their jobs or, at the very least, professional? Instead, we get an endless string of nervous receptionists, anxious marketing executives (remember that one? from the Heathman, way back at the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey?), stuttering waitresses, and mumbling valets?
And why in the name of all that is holy is Ana angry with Christian for using his own money to tip a service person who performed a service? Service and a smile? I like how Ana has to tell us that she doesn't care about money, then repeatedly uses her boyfriend's wealth as a weapon against people she feels are beneath her. This is why she's going to be one of those old rich people that everybody hates. Her staff is going to want to stab her in her sleep. OMG, I want them to visit the Grey mansion and for Gretchen to poison her tea. Her stupid foreign tea.
Christian takes Ana to her surprise, which is shopping for a new car. The Submissive Special is ruined, clearly, because it was drenched in white paint and the tires were slashed. Financially, it makes more sense to buy a new car than to fix these things. Right.
Ana convinces us that's she not spoiled some more, and then hates on the car salesman. This fucking girl.
I resign myself to my fate. A Saab? Do I want a Saab? I quite liked the Audi Submissive Special.
STFU AND DIAF, as my friends over at ohaidesk would say. (Check out their LJ! Fifty Shades recaps galore!)
Troy Turniansky, the salesman, is all over Fifty like a cheap suit. He can smell a sale.
Later, she mentions that "he's smarmy, too."
ANA. YOU ARE GETTING YOUR SECOND FREE CAR IN TWO WEEKS. SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH AND TRY TO BE THE LEAST BIT GRATEFUL.
Godfuckingdamnit, I hate her. ANGRY BLOGGER IS ANGRY.
We do get of the lulz when EL James tries to write in gearhead, though.
"Sir, the 9-3? I've located one at our Bevery Hills dealership. We can have it here for you in a couple of days." Troy glows with triumph.
"Top of the range?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hey Mr. Ford, do you have that Mustang GT for me?"
"I sure do, just gotta fly it in from Detroit."
"And that's the A+ version, right? The state-of-the-art model with unicorn interior?"
"Yes, sir."
After buying a car, Ana and Christian go to a bar called SP's Place, a name carefully designed to fuck with the speech-impaired, and when Ana meets the bartender, blatant racism ensues.
He's black and beautiful, his dark eyes assessing me and not finding me wanting, it seems. One large diamond stud winks at me from his ear. I like him immediately.
So, you know, she is NOT RACIST. Because she's met two black people so far, and she's LIKED THEM BOTH VERY MUCH. For the record, whenever a Jack Hyde checks Ana out, it's disgusting. But a black guy, now there's a compliment. Headdesk and facepalm.
After buying a car and drinking at a bar, the next logical step is to spend the day on Christian's special boat. Behold, the powers of three minutes spent on Wikipedia.
Holy cow. It must be at least forty, maybe fifty feet. Two sleek white hulls, a deck, a roomy cabin, and towering overhead an impressive maste. I know nothing about boats, but I can tell this one is special.
Well, knock me over with a feather. A deck?
Christian displays his dickish powers of pretention once again.
"Built by my company," he says proudy, and my heart swells. "She's been designed from the ground up by the very best naval architects in the world and constructed here in Seattle at my yard. She has hybrid electric drives, asymmetric dagger boards, a square-topped mainsail--"
Why does her heart swell because his company built the boat? P.S., let's add "building boats" to the list of things Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. does, because beauty salons, publishing houses, food-drops in Africa, and my God I don't even remember the rest, wasn't far-fetched enough.
And why the fuck would he need the best naval architects in the world? What purpose do they serve? Is the boat commissioned by the US Navy during times of war? Don't those architects have something better to do than pander to people with too much money on their hands? And what's this about "my yard"? Christian owns a shipyard?
Why the fuck not.
When they leave the marina, this happens:
Behind us, a small crowd has gathered on the dockside to watch our depature. Small children are waving, and I wave back.
For some reason, I'm getting the feeling that EL James watched Titanic right before writing this chapter. Ana even drives the boat, which is totally cool, because you don't need a license to do that. Oh, and I forgot-
He picks up the receiver and radios the coast guard as Mac calls up that we are set to go.
What the fuck does he need to call the coast guard for? Is this special boat so scary that they're gonna mistake it for a pirate ship?
We're rewarded for the nauseating cheese of this chapter with probably my favorite image in FSD.
He kisses me quickly, then steps off his captain's chair and bounds up to the front of the boat to join Mac, where he starts unfurling sails, untying ropes, and operating winches and pulleys. They work well together in a team, shouting various nautical terms to each other, and it's warming to see Fify interacting with someone else in such a carefree manner.
Did her internet crash or something? I'm doubled over laughing, imagining Christian in a ridiculous captain's hat and blue blazer with giant gold buttons, running haphazardly around a boat yelling "Port!", "Starboard!", and "HOIST THE MAINSAIL, SKIPPY!" while Mac, whose entire job is (apparently) to live on Christian's boat and help him sail it three or four times a year, chases him shouting, "Galley below!"
I'm in tears.
We end with some uninspiring sex on a boat.
My intrepid fingers move through his pubic hair to his erection, and I grasp him tightly.
That line sort of makes it sound like he has crabs.