The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades Freed, Chapter 25, part 2 & epilogue

Will this be the big Scene that the whole series has been building up to? Or will EL James screw with us once again?

“So you want to play?” he murmurs.
“Yes.”
He says nothing, and I risk a quick glance . . . up his jeans, his denim clad thighs, the soft bulge at his fly, the open button at the waist, his happy trail, his navel, his chiseled abdomen, his chest hair, his gray eyes blazing, and his head cocked to one side. He’s arching an eyebrow. Oh shit.
“Yes what?” he whispers.
Oh.
“Yes, Sir.”
His eyes soften. “Good girl,” he murmurs, and he caresses my head. “I think we’d better get you upstairs now,” he adds. My insides liquefy, and my belly clenches in that delicious way.

Except it isn’t the big scene. We get the barest hint of it.

“You know, you’re topping from the bottom,” he murmurs against my lips.
“What?” I don’t understand what he’s talking about.
“Don’t worry. I’ll live with it,” he whispers, amused, and he runs his nose along my jaw and gently bites my ear. “Once inside, kneel, like I’ve shown you.”

He never told her what topping and bottoming is, nor did he ever tell her how to kneel for her. It’s the last full chapter and EL James is dropping a lot of BDSM stuff on us, knowing she won’t have to come back and deal with it.

“Yes . . . Sir.”
He gazes down at me, eyes shining with love, wonder, and wicked thoughts.
Jeez . . .  Life is never going to be boring with Christian, and I’m in this for the long haul. I love this man: my husband, my lover, father of my child, my sometimes Dominant . . . my Fifty Shades.

Finally, now, we get a BDSM scene, just as the book ends. What the hell?

On to the epilogue: It’s the distant future of 2014, and Ana is reminiscing by her house. EL James throws us a bone by giving us a flashback to their last night at their home in Seattle.

The strands of the flogger skim across my swollen belly at an aching, languorous pace.
“Have you had enough yet, Ana?” Christian whispers in my ear.
“Oh, please.” I beg, pulling on the restraints above my head as I stand blindfolded and tethered to the grid in the playroom.

For a moment, I thought that Ana was being flogged on her pregnant belly, but that was a misreading.

The scene is okay, no blatant safety or consent violations.

He swoops on me suddenly, kissing me hard, throwing his leg over mine, and grabbing my hands so they are above my head. “You love the kinky fuckery,” he whispers, and he runs his nose down mine.
I grin, caught in his infectious, wicked smile. “Yes, I love the kinky fuckery. And I love you. Very much.”

So, Christian is cured of BDSM but not kinky fuckery?

Ana jerks out of flashback for a perfect tableau of her heterosexual, monogamous, nuclear family. The steelhard man is completely recuperated into the cult of domesticity. Ana is even a business success.

There’s another flashback to the difficult delivery of Theodore, Ana and Christian’s son. When you play the pregnancy plot development card, the bonus is that you also get a childbirth scene out of it.

And that’s that. Except it isn’t.

My copy has some bonus material: EL James explaining that, no, you can’t just withdraw $5 million in cash. She provides a brief exchange between Christian and the bank manager, reaffirming Christian’s near omnipotence and general dickishness with everybody.

Next is “Fifty’s First Christmas”, yes, the Fifty Shades of Grey Christmas Special. It’s Christmas with his adoptive family in child Christian’s POV, and boy does that get tired fast.

Finally, there’s “Meet Fifty Shades”, which is Christian and Ana’s first and second meeting, but from his point of view. Like there just isn’t enough of this stuff. (Stephanie Meyer wrote a partial book in the Twilight series called Midnight Sun, which retold the story from Edward’s perspective, but never finished or published it because somebody leaked out an partial draft.)

This isn’t Wind Done Gone, which shows a familiar story from a completely new angle. This just reiterates the first few chapters, from Ana’s face-plant into Christian’s office onward, and doesn’t tell us anything new about Ana and Christian. If anything, it puts Christian in a worse light. He comes across as arrogant, twitchy bordering on manic, and even more controlling than before. Inexplicably besotted with the plain and fumbling Ana, his first act after meeting her is to get his security goon to provide a complete dossier on her. He even acknowledges that he’s stalking Ana when he goes to pester her at her job.

And, hopefully, that’s all she wrote. Analysis to come.