Oh man, guys, last time we left off Christian’s former sub Leila showed up! To talk to Ana at work! Last time we saw Leila she had a gun and was (sort of?) tryna kill Ana. How dare she show her face here again when she didn’t get the job done!
Also Matt and I are gonna put together an e-book for Bared to You, so get pumped!
Chapter 16
We open with a convoluted explanation about how Prescott, a member of Christian’s security team, has explicit orders not to let Leila come into contact with Ana. However, Prescott happened to be in the bathroom when Leila showed up.
“Oh. I see.” I realize that even Prescott has to pee, and I laugh. “Oh dear.”
I wish Ana had just thought peeing! You know, how she always responds to mundane statements in her head. I wonder if Ana knows that everybody poops too. I mean, she was an English major. Isn’t Everybody Poops is required reading? I wish I’d written my senior thesis on that. I wrote about shit anyway.
Ana decides she definitely wants to know what Leila has to say, so she convinces Prescott to let it happen despite Christian’s orders not to. Ana shoots Christian an e-mail explaining the situation, and is all regretful because they’ve finally been getting along for five minutes. I hope someday I can be in such a healthy marriage.
Leila has shown up with another woman, Susi, who is also a former sub of Christians. In fact, they have a club.
Susi speaks. “I know this is all kinds of weird, but I wanted to meet you, too. The woman who captured Chris—”
I hold up my hand, stopping her in mid-sentence. I do not want to hear this. “Um . . . I get the picture,” I mutter.“We call ourselves the sub club.” She grins at me, her eyes shining with mirth.
Well, that is just awkward as fuck. I can’t even judge. At this point I would have just been like, “Bitch, what the fuck do you want?”
Christian calls again and again until finally Prescott hands Ana her phone.
“What the fuck are you playing at?” he shouts. He’s seething.
“Don’t shout at me.”
“What do you mean don’t shout at you?” he shouts, louder this time. “I gave specific instructions which you have completely disregarded—again. Hell, Ana, I am fucking furious.”
Yo, is it just me or is Christian the hottest man alive? I mean the way he just shouts and orders Ana around and doesn’t let her make any decisions for herself is just really tickling the taco if ya know what I mean.
Ana hangs up on Christian, and Leila is super impressed. FEMINISM!!!! Leila apologizes for all that crazy shizzy she pulled awhile back. Aw, I hope they have a sleepover or something.
Leila admits that she’s here because she knows Christian will show up, and he’s repeatedly refused to see her. She asks Ana if it’s cool if she talks to him. Ana’s really uncomfortable, but she asks why Leila needs to see him, so Leila explains she wants to thank Christian for getting her help. Ana proves to be a total moron. Again.
Once again I’m speechless. What does she expect me to say? Surely she should be saying these things to Christian, not me.
Ana, sweetie. You literally just told us readers that you don’t want her to see Christian, and then you asked Leila why she wanted to see him! She explained that she’s grateful! She is asking you if she can say these things to him that you don’t know how to respond to and think she should be telling him! Good God.
Leila says that Christian is one of the few men she’s ever loved. Ana’s reaction is again bizarre.
But my overwhelming response to this poor young woman is compassion. Mentally I run through all the classical literature I can think of that deals with unrequited love. Swallowing hard, I clutch the moral high ground.
How does she have the time to run through all that? Why is that where her mind goes? How does this inspire her to clutch the moral high ground? We don’t even get an example of a text she’s inspired by in this moment to not claw Leila’s eyes out. What a poor attempt to bring back one of Ana’s character traits. I’m using that term really loosely, by the way.
“I know. He’s very easy to love,” I whisper.
Her wide eyes widen further in surprise, and she smiles. “Yes. He is— was.” She corrects herself quickly and blushes. Then she giggles so sweetly that I can’t help myself. I giggle, too. Yes, Christian Grey makes us giggly.
And then they had a pillow-fight and made prank phone calls to boys! Like Christian!
Christian and Leila’s conversation is stupid when he finally storms in and starts yelling at everyone. She doesn’t say any of the stuff she told Ana, instead she tells him she had to see if he was okay. That is some dumb shit, y’all. This is basically just another opportunity for an outside character to remark on Ana and Christian’s happiness when in actuality all they ever do is fight. I mean, they’re happy when they have sex.
Ana needs a reason to create more drama, so she gets upset that Christian was really cold to Leila and starts…defending her? What the hell does Ana want! If he was super nice to Leila, she’d be furious that he was being so nice to a woman who held her at gunpoint! But Christian is like, “I’m helping her out, but you’re the love of my life and she threatened you. It’s unforgivable.” So you’d think Ana would be happy about this! I sure would be!
“Why are you championing her cause all of a sudden?” he asks, mystified and irritable.
“Look, Christian, I don’t think Leila and I will be swapping recipes and knitting patterns anytime soon. But I didn’t think you’d be so heartless to her.”
I love how James always throws shit like “mystified” and “irritable” together. And her grasp on female stereotypes is truly remarkable.
Also, that still explains nothing about why Ana is being an idiot about this. Oh wait. It’s because somehow this goes back to Christian accepting that he loved his mother.
Suddenly, it’s my lifetime ambition to make him realize this. It’s painstakingly obvious that he cares. Why does he deny it? It’s like his feelings for his birth mother. Oh shit—of course. His feelings for Leila and his other submissives are tangled up with his feelings for his mother. I like to whip little brown-haired girls like you because you all look like the crack whore. No wonder he’s so mad. I sigh and shake my head. Paging Dr. Flynn, please. How can he not see this?
SO INSIGHTFUL! God, this is so deep.
This post is getting really long, so I’m just going to tell you. They have sex a lot, and Ana gets Christian to admit he cares after like 5 more pages. Maybe Matt can mine some gold from those pages I just skipped for all of our sanity.
Then we find out that Ray (Ana’s dad) is in the hospital! So there is MORE DRAMA!