Page 36 of Obedience

From the fleeting twist in Greta’s expression, she was clearly reluctant to hurt Dylan, but she quickly squared her shoulders and pulled her hand away from Dylan’s soft grip as if determined not to let a single chink in her armour show ever again.

‘Yes. I have found one.’

The words seemed to wound Greta as deeply as they did Dylan but they were out there now, hanging heavily in the space between them.

‘I see,’ Dylan replied. She couldn’t read Greta properly; she was giving nothing away. Dylan narrowed her eyes and smiled. She waited a beat, scanning Greta’s face. ‘You’re lying,’ she bluffed.

Greta’s facade slipped with the blush of her cheeks. ‘What I do with my time is none of your business, Miss St John.’ The harshness of her tone struck Dylan as overcompensation.

‘You’re fucking lying.’ A wide smile slowly spread across Dylan’s face. She moved toward Greta, positioning herself directly opposite her. Greta dropped her gaze, avoiding Dylan’s eyes as she watched Dylan’s hand reach for hers again. ‘Why can’t you look at me?’ Dylan said softly. Ignoring Dylan’s hand, Greta huffed a burst of air through her mouth as though the whole interaction was becoming far too tedious. ‘Look at me, Greta,’ Dylan insisted in a low whisper, dipping her head to find Greta’s gaze. Greta hesitated before looking up, and Dylan witnessed the sudden undoing of weeks of self-restraint. The brown of Greta’s eyes lacked their usual depth; dark half moons rested at the tops of her cheeks. As she looked at Greta, Dylan’s eyebrows pushed together, the agony of being without her now on the cusp of being too much to stand. She closed the gap between them. Reaching forward, Dylan slid a hand around Greta’s waist. ‘Meet me later—’

‘Are you finished with the printer, Doctor Vincent?’ A nasal voice pierced the tension, shocking them both back into the room.

As she quickly withdrew her hand, Dylan’s head fell forward with a breathily muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Huh?’ Greta said, blinking rapidly. ‘Oh yes, sorry, those are mine.’ Looking flustered, she took the papers handed to her by a woman, who was the most librariany-looking librarian Dylan had ever seen. The woman suspiciously scanned them both. ‘My office printer is broken,’ Greta said jovially, adding a huff and a theatrical eye roll. ‘Probably the bloody toner again.’

Dylan tilted her head, watching Greta’s terrible improv with a smirk.

‘Have you logged it?’ the librarian asked. Her investment in Greta’s printer started to irritate Dylan.

‘A-ha,’ Greta replied breezily, clearly desperate for the interaction to be over. She turned to Dylan, avoiding her gaze. ‘Anyway, Miss St John, I’ll leave you to it thank you for these goodbye.’ The words melded into one rushed sentence as she waved the papers back and forth in the air at the librarian.

Passing Dylan, Greta had a telltale flush of red across her neck and chest, the skin visibly blotched with a nervous rash. Knowing she was well and truly under Greta’s skin unleashed a deluge of satisfaction—Dylan was done fucking around. Standing still, a small smile on her lips, Dylan watched the apparently unflappable Dr Greta Vincent leave the library, flapped.

Chapter twelve

Juice?

Exhausted, irritable, and absolutely over the week despite it only being Thursday—and facing yet another Friday without meeting Dylan—Greta stepped out of the lift on her floor of the apartment building, straight into a waiting Dylan.

‘Oh, abso-fucking-lutely not,’ Greta said sternly, one hand remaining in her bag in search of her keys. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘Michael let me up. He likes me.’ Dylan grinned. ‘I’m not leaving, so you either invite me in now, or I wait here until you do.’

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?!’ Greta snapped with a pointed glare.

‘I don’t care what you say to me, Greta. You’re not my client anymore. I am an adult, as are you. Behave like one.’

Raising her chin defiantly, Greta blinked at her. She scanned Dylan’s face in a bid to understand who the fuck she thought she was, but her beautiful features and raised eyebrow just made Greta want her even more. Although initially annoyed at the unbidden intrusion, she was relieved to see her again. She wanted her to stay. She desperately wanted to invite her in.

‘I’m not inviting you into my home, Dylan.’

The guilt of it being Muriel’s home stung behind her eyes and in her cheeks.

‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow when you leave for work. Or perhaps after work when you go out on a date, or do whatever you do on a Friday night. Oh, hang on, Friday is bossy-Miss Grenson-Fem-Domme Day, isn't it? With your new escort?’

‘Really?’ Greta whisper-shouted, quickly scanning the corridor.

‘I’ll still be here if you bring them home—I don’t know if you do that these days—or when you get home afterwards. Which hotel is it this week? I wasn’t much of a fan of Gotham… Perhaps we could compare my performance with theirs?’

The sheer audacity of Dylan, standing in her building, uninvited, with derision dancing over her face, caught Greta completely off guard. She forced herself to look indifferent—even if the muscles twitching in her clenched jaw belied her apparent composure. ‘Okay, fine,’ she said stubbornly as she walked away.

‘Fine,’ Dylan retorted, equally as obstinate. ‘Bye then!’ she called out after her, prompting an internal eye roll from Greta, who was finding her childishness utterly intolerable.

Slamming the front door behind her hard enough to rattle the frame, Greta threw down her bag and keys and headed toward her wine cooler with the full intention of continuing her evening as planned. She would pick out a nice bottle of wine, run a bath and relax.

She would ignore Dylan.