Moonlighting: A Thanksgiving Story by Vicki Blue Read Free Book Online

returning to class, I knew the headmaster had indeed taken my
brief testimony into account and had confronted them. Had he punished them as
he’d punished me? I could not know, but I did feel a bit of empathy for their
plight as I pondered that this might be the case. The sting of the cane was
still fresh on my bottom; I conducted all of my instruction standing up.
    By day’s end
my legs were tired and I was looking forward to seeking my apartment in the
teacher’s dorm. But as I was about to exit my classroom I saw Mr. Edge standing
in the doorway.
    “I wanted to
thank you for alerting me to what has been going on in your classroom,” he
said. “Bullying will not be tolerated here, and now Miss Troy, Miss Gray and
Miss Brookshire will likely spend their evening lying on their tummies
pondering that fact.”
    So he had
caned them. I tried to keep my expression impassive nodded.
    “In the
future, however,” he said. “You will refrain from taking matters into your own
hands. You should have come to me, Miss Edge.”
    “How can I
when I am so frightened of you?” I asked quietly.
    “There is no
need to be frightened of me,” he replied.
    “You truly
say that, after what happened today? Respectfully, sir, you are not seeing
things from my perspective.”
    He chuckled.
“I grew up in a boarding school. I know what it is like to fear authority. But
I also know authority is only frightening when you seek to defy it. Had you
come to me early on, both you and those three girls would have been spared my
correction.”
    I nodded. “Yes
sir.”
    Mr. Edge
walked over to me. “Don’t be disappointed in yourself, Miss Hill. You are a
good teacher. And I find you very attractive.”
    He drew me
into his arms then and I…
    “NO!” Charlotte
began to backspace furiously, erasing the last three paragraphs from the page.
With a groan of frustration she stood and walked away from the computer. This
wasn’t helping at all. If anything, it was making things worse because her mind
was offering up completely unrealistic solutions. She did not live in
turn-of-the-century England. It was 2011 and the Falmont headmaster was not
going to profess love to her.
    Charlotte
suddenly felt lonelier than she’d ever felt in her life. Apart from anonymous
postings on chat boards, she’d never told anyone about her submissive
tendencies or fascination with spanking. Even her family did not know, and it
wasn’t something she felt she could share with her mother. None of her friends
from college knew; they’d have been mortified, she was sure. The only person
who knew was Nigel Longbridge, and he was the last person she could phone to
talk to.
    And now here she
sat, just a few days before Thanksgiving, confused, lonely and terribly sad.
She began to cry, yanking a handful of tissues from the end table as she
settled onto the couch. Tomorrow was the big day for the kids. There would be a
big Thanksgiving feast around lunchtime, followed by the long-awaited play and
then an early release. And then?
    The phone rang,
jarring her thoughts. It was Charlotte’s mother, and she could tell right away
that something was wrong.
    “Hi sweetie!”
    “Hi, Mom. What
are you doing?”
    She heard a sigh
on the other end of the line. “I’m at the hospital.”
    “The hospital?
Is everything OK?”
    “It’s your Aunt
Kit. She was in a car accident this afternoon.”
    Charlotte
gasped. Aunt Kit was her mother’s twin sister. She lived in New Jersey.  “Is
she going to be OK?”
    “She’s going to
be fine. Her foot’s broken and she’s in surgery now. She was lucky. I’ve seen
the car and….”  Her mother’s voice trailed off.
    “I guess you’ll
be with her for Thanksgiving instead of coming here…”
    “Oh, sweetie…you
know I’d be there if I could. But with Ray still deployed I can’t leave Kit.
She doesn’t have anyone to help her. You understand, right?”
    “And Grady?”
Charlotte held out hope that perhaps her brother would