The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades Freed, Chapters 18 & 19

Ray’s still in the hospital and it’s Ana’s birthday. There’s very little kink content in chapter 18, even less than the Aspen chapters.

I could take this opportunity to discuss how a D/s relationship should handle the intrusion of a real life crisis like the serious illness of a family member, but I wouldn’t call what Ana and Christian have a D/s relationship. It’s really a marriage that occasionally has BDSM play. There isn’t an overarching agreement that regulates their interaction. Ana has been more involved in their BDSM interactions, but this particular plot thread is very slow. We’re in the last third of the book three, and their BDSM relationship is still in the very early stages.

If you’re interested, Ray wakes up when Ana reads the sports section to him.

So, in chapter 19 we finally get back to kink. Ana does bring up the idea of doing kink, though couched in coy, tentative terms.

“You’re after something less gentle?”
“Something life-affirming.”
He raises his brows in surprise. “Life-affirming,” he repeats, astonished humor in his voice.
I nod. He gazes at me for a moment. “Don’t bite your lip,” he whispers then rises suddenly with me in his arms. I gasp and grab his biceps, fearful that he’ll drop me. He walks over to the smallest of the three couches and deposits me on to it.

Christian again checks in with her before getting seriously into it, as he should.

“Sit.” He grabs my ponytail again and pulls my head back. “You’ll tell me to stop if this gets too much, yes?”
I nod.
“Say it.” His voice is stern.
“Yes,” I squeak.
He smirks. “Good. So, Mrs. Grey . . . by popular demand, I’m going to restrain you.”

Christian ties her up lightly, using bathrobe belts as improvised ropes.

“I’m improvising.” He smirks again and fastens the slipknot above my knee and ties the other end of the soft belt around the finial at the back corner of the sofa, effectively parting my legs.

Slipknots should not be used in bondage. One of the first rules of bondage is that the restraint should not get tighter, no matter what the restrained person does. Quality handcuffs are designed with locking mechanisms to prevent that, and the proper knots for bondage are designed to not get tighter either.

Spread open, Christian has Ana pleasure herself while she watches. So far, so good. Again, the BDSM interactions are mostly okay, it’s everything else around that that is the problem.

A police detective meets with Ana about Jack Hyde. I had hoped there would be another shoe to drop in the Jack Hyde plot, but lands with a very faint tap. Hyde, now in jail, claims Ana made sexual advances to him, and fabricated the claim that he assaulted her to get him fired. Ana denies this. The detective also mentions the mysterious note, which Christian has seen by Ana hasn’t. What exactly this is supposed to accomplish isn’t clear. There’s been no mention of any sexual assault charges against Jack, and such a claim won’t do much to help a man who was found trespassing on private property with a gun.

Christian inserts himself into the police interview, and does a very poor job of concealing his displeasure from the detective. One gets the impression that, for Christian, just being in the same room as a person he can’t control, who answers to a higher authority, is a struggle.

EL James does drop a much bigger bombshell on us: after missing several appointments to renew her birth control shot, Ana is pregnant. (Thanks, Mr. “I hate condoms”!)