A Different Blue(65)

in ten seconds. And even worse, she had to remind me that “I wasn't Duchess material.”

I stomped to my room, mentally defending myself. It was perfectly acceptable to have a crush on

a fictional character. Most women did! Cheryl, for all her insistence on giving me a reality

check, had a thing for vampires, for hell sake!

But that wasn't the problem, and deep down I was too honest to deny it. It was perfectly fine to

have a crush on the fictional Mr. Darcy, but it wasn't acceptable to have a thing for the real

one. And I had a thing for my young history teacher. No doubt about it.





Chapter Twelve





The test was positive. I took several more over the next few days, until I could no longer

convince myself that all the results were wrong. I was pregnant. At least eight weeks along, by

my calculation. I had slept with Mason the night Wilson and I had been stranded at the school,

and I'd avoided him since. He had called and texted, but other than a few angry messages on my

voicemail, making insinuations about “Adam,” he had stayed away. He probably felt guilty about

the picture, but I had really hoped he would move on because I had.

I had moved on, but life had sent me hurtling back. And I was devastated. I missed a week of

school, called in sick to work, and slept constantly, unable to face the truth. The nausea that

had forced me to face the possibility that I might be in trouble in the first place descended on

me with a vengeance, making it easier to wallow and hide. Cheryl was mostly oblivious, but after

a week of my not leaving the house, I knew I would have to “recover” or risk having to explain

to Cheryl what was wrong with me. I wasn't ready for that conversation yet, so I pulled myself

together and went back to school and resumed my normal shifts at the cafe. But the knowledge was

like a painful sliver trying to work its way out, constantly there, just under the surface,

impossible to escape, impossible to eradicate, and before long, impossible to ignore.





We had been talking about the Spanish inquisition for a week, and the correlation between the

inquisition and witch hunts had been Wilson's monologue to start the day.

[page]“We think of witchcraft as a mostly medieval phenomenon, but roughly 100,000 people were

tried for witchcraft between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Of those tried,

approximately 60,000 were executed. Burned at the stake, more often than not. 75% of those

executed were women. Why the disproportionate numbers? Well, woman are more susceptible to the

influence of the devil, see.” Wilson's eyebrows quirked as the girls in the class immediately

took issue with his statement.

“What?” he threw his hands up in mock protest. “It all started with Adam and Eve, didn't it?

At least that was the logic of the church throughout the medieval period and forward. Many of

the women who were accused were poor and elderly. Women also worked in the areas of midwivery

and healing. They were the ones who cooked and cared for others, so the idea of them cooking up

a potion or poison or casting a spell was an easier label to lay on a woman than a man. Men

settled things with their fists, but women were less physical and more verbal, perhaps more

prone to giving a tongue lashing that might be construed as a witch's curse. I find it

interesting that in history all one had to do to discredit a woman was label her a witch. How do