Spoilers about the whole grayson thing.
The one thing I appreciate about the whole grayson-emily kiss is that how different grayson is with other girls that are not lyra, even with Emily before dying.
When Nora in the books describes just kissing Grayson, Lyra says that if grayson had kissed Nora the way he kissed her she wouldn't really describe it as just a kiss.
Then, when Emily asks him to kiss her, she says "kiss me like you mean it," but after that instead of looking so smug, like she would, she looks shooked and angry.
My bet is that Emily had never been kissed by grayson like that before, and they have done even more than just kissing, so it must have been a shook. This is why after that she asks him if he was pretending she was lyra, and when she gets his answer she gets even more angry because she never got that from him and lyra did.
What I understood from all of this is that grayson has always been a character that has restrained himself in so many things, even in possible relationships.
Emily always tried to make Grayson lose control, and maybe she did that, but in this scene she realises that she never fully accomplished that because when he kissed her like lyra it was completely different to what it had been for her. It meant that he gave lyra willingly what she had to force him to give her. Lyra got the Grayson she wanted, and she hated that.
I feel like this scenes tried to explain that in the first trilogy and before, grayson had never let himself lose his self-control, but when it comes to lyra (even in the first book), he was never really able to fully restrain himself.
This is one of the hundred proof that tgg and gr have. He spent most of those books touching her face, holding her hand, looking at het with puppy eyes, getting close to her even when he had said he was not going to get close to her. He was like that with her since the beginning when he didn't even know her. Of course the fact that lyra had this version of grayson is related to the fact that he is healing, but part of me thinks that it is just because he found the right person, and he knew that.
*plays margaret by lana del rey*
