The chapter opens with Ana waking up.  Just for you guys, I went back and counted.  This is the seventh chapter so far that begins with Ana waking up.  A full third of the chapters in this book use the most boring, most clichéd opener employed by hack writers all over the world.  A third.

I shudder to think what he went through as a small child, and I understand why he lives here, isolated, surrounded by beautiful, precious works of art – so far removed from where he started… mission statement indeed.

No, you understand nothing.  Because having an addict for a mother doesn’t tell you shit about his personality, and living in a multi-million dollar apartment in the sky isn’t exactly one of the hallmark signs of childhood abuse.  Saying that you ‘understand’ now why he lives there is implying you were confused before.  Like it was just unfathomable to you why a billionaire would have a fancy penthouse apartment.

Remember in Pretty Woman, where Richard Greere’s character said he always got penthouse hotel rooms even though he was afraid of heights simply because they were penthouse hotel rooms and therefore the best in the building?  Grey was rich as sin after his new parents adopted him, and he’s richer than sin now.  Maybe he just wanted the best house in the city.

I’m in this fantasy apartment, having fantasy sex with my fantasy boyfriend.

Well…I’ve never had a book come out and admit that before.  Interesting.

Ana wanders out into the house and finds a middle-aged blonde woman cleaning up.  She introduces herself as Mrs. Jones, the housekeeper, and is perfectly polite and non-judgmental to Ana.  Ana responds to this by wondering if Mrs. Jones is one of Grey’s former subs.  WTF, Ana, your brain makes no sense.

And what is with the plethora of blonde characters?

Ana finds Grey in his study and eveasdropps while Grey is talking business.  He covers three distinct subjects (a company someone wants him to buy out, a prototype that’s not quite finished, and a meeting later that day) and all his sentences end in ellipses.  Either he’s a very scatterbrained businessman, or the ellipses were there to indicate a passage of time, and Ana was standing the doorway for a long while without making a sound.

Ana greets him, and decides that early morning is make-out time.  Grey tells her to go take a shower or he’ll “lay her out across the desk” and she asks for sex without missing a beat.  Ung, another sex scene?

Well, it lasts about a page and is utterly boring.  He fucks her on his desk, whoopie.  She goes on for a bit about how it’s “not making love, it’s fucking” and so very primal, but…who the fuck cares.  Comparatively speaking, it wasn’t even that unusual. 

Grey makes a comment about how she’s so ‘beguiling,’ as if we’re supposed to take the fact that he fucks her a lot as a sign that he’s falling in love with her.  Then he asks if she ‘has’ to go to Georgia, and she says yes, despite the fact that in the last chapter she said she lied about the whole thing and hadn’t even made plans yet.

Make up your mind, book!  God damn, this writing is horrible.

This chapter is duller than usual, as they spend several pages with Ana being all drama-y over Grey’s mood swings, even though I couldn’t detect anything off about his behavior. 

I look to my subconscious. She’s whistling with her hands behind her back and looking anywhere but at me. She hasn’t got a clue, and my inner goddess is still basking in a remnant of post-coital glow. No – we’re all clueless.

God damnit, Ana, did you really think that the other parts of yourself would know something?  They aren’t (or shouldn’t be) autonomous.  They can’t go out on little spy missions for you.  (Although, how cool would that be?)

They both sit down to breakfast, which Grey once again forces her to eat, and start talking about her trip.  Ana plans to buy her tickets online over the internet.  …For a plane ride that she wants to take that evening.  Boy, for a poor college student who can’t even afford her own computer, she sure has no problem dropping $600+ on a last-minute plane ticket.  Those things ain’t cheep.  (Seattle to Georgia is $680 if I leave today, and it’s a red-eye.  The same flight a month from now is only $378.)

Grey offers to let her use his jet instead of buy plane tickets.  Ana turns it down, because apparently she does have hundreds of dollars to waste on a last minute trip.

They make more jokes about he’s going to track her cell phone in order to stalk her.  Fuck, if I were in her shoes…well, I wouldn’t have made it past the first chapter, but anyway.  Ana, take the battery out of your phone. 

“I’ll miss you too. More than you know,” he breathes.

My heart warms at his words. He really is trying, hard. He gently strokes my cheek, bends down, and kisses me softly.

Trying?  He’s really trying?  To do what?  It’s not that hard to say “I’ll miss you.”  Come back when he actually does something respectful and then tell me he’s trying.

Later that day, Ana is at her second interview.  The first was at a large publishing house, but she doesn’t really want that one because she thinks that she’d be “swallowed up and spat out pretty quickly.”  She wants to work for this other place instead, which is small and quirky and supports local writers.  I don’t like this, and I can’t put my finger on why.  Maybe it’s the big business hate.  Maybe it’s the implication that Ana can’t handle the competition of other interns besides herself.  Maybe it’s the fact that I’m just plain old sick of the ‘quirky’ small business being held up as so much better than everyone else, just for the fact that it’s quirky.  Well you know what?  This shit was published by a small business, so I’m thinking they’re just as capable of churning out crap.  Maybe it’s the fact that, while everything she says can be perfectly valid (hey, some people don’t like to work in a corporate atmosphere, and that’s fine), it’s just such a fucking ‘stock character’ trait that I sneer every time I see it.

The receptionist is a young African-American woman with large silver earrings and long straightened hair. She has a bohemian look about her, the sort of woman I could be friendly with.

Unlike the blonde receptionists at Grey’s building, who were clearly bitches.  You can tell, because they were blonde.  This woman, on the other hand, isn’t blonde, so she can be Ana’s friend.

Another woman comes out, and she also looks bohemian, so she clearly must be a good person.  As we all know, only evil women wear business suits.

In the interview, Ana gives all her answers in summary form, which means we don’t get any insight into her character at all.  Interviews are a very specific scenario and can be used to great effect, to show how good a character is (or isn’t) at handling stress, at reading other people, at playing to an ‘audience,’ at being charming on command.  But we get none of that, because as we’ve covered, Ana isn’t a character.  She’s a puppet.

The interview ends on an anticlimactic note, as most interviews do.  Just a ‘thanks for coming in, we’ll call to let you know.’  But, if you’re not going to have your interview stand out, and you’re not going to use it to show off the character, then why the hell bore your readers with it?

Ana goes home and talks to Kate, once again bringing up Kate’s comment at dinner the previous night.

“Look, if he wasn’t Elliot’s brother I’d have said a lot worse. He’s a real control freak. I don’t know how you stand it. I was trying to make him jealous – give him a little help with his commitment issues.”

What?  Is Kate trying to make him explode so that Ana will realize he’s a bad guy and leave him, or is she trying to make him ‘realize’ that he really ‘loves’ Ana and treat her better?  (Which, by the by, jealousy is not the best way to go about either of those situations.)  I can’t tell if the writing is so bad that the author forgot to put a transition between the two thoughts, or if she somehow thinks the two are one and the same.

Ana admits that she’s fallen for Grey, and Kate says it’s obvious that they’re both crazy about each other.  Then Kate asks if they’ve told each other that yet, despite the fact that it’s only been…what, a week?

“That’ll be the sexing! If that’s going well, then that’s half the battle Ana.”

I am so, so embarrassed that at one point, I wanted Kate to be the heroine.  Although, who knows, she might have at least been more entertaining.

Kate runs off to get dinner, and Ana sits and mopes and wonders if Grey really likes her.  Excuse me, ‘has feelings for her.’  By this book’s definition of ‘love,’ though, he’s already made that fact extremely clear, so I’m really wondering why Ana isn’t picking up on that.  (Then again, this is the same girl that still thinks his chest scars are from the pox.)

Ana and Grey banter over email, though they don’t come close to talking about what Ana was thinking about, so it’s just more filler.  She also asks if he ever slept with Mrs. Jones, but why the fuck did she think he did in the first place?  (He didn’t, btw.)

Ana arrives at the airport and realizes that she’s been upgraded to first class.  For some reason, instead of going “yay, legroom!” she finds this incredibly annoying.

With that, the chapter ends.  Well, at least it was short and didn’t finish with her going to sleep.