The Tragic Tale of Teddy Woven novel Chapter 26

Soft slippers shuffled across the hardwood floor, an odd sound at such a late time of night. It was just after three o’clock in the morning, and still I was not able to get any form of sleep. I crept around my dining room table to get to the counter-top, hoping a glass of water would at least ease the irritation in my throat. A light lamp was flickered on over my stove-top, brightening up the area enough for me to see more clearly. I looked over my shoulder at the couch, Teddy’s swollen eyes staring back at me. He was outstretched upon my living room couch with a patterned butterfly blanket piled over him. He nearly laughed when I gave him the blanket tonight, but unfortunately I did not have any patterns that suited him. I had no idea the reasoning behind me purchasing that blanket with such a childish pattern, but like everything in life, it seemed right at the time. I raised up a hand in greeting, which only made him bat tired looking eyelids at me. “Hey,” I muttered, since I knew he was still in a sullen mood.

“Hello, Sela,” he uttered in a sad-like voice that nearly broke my heart. I bit down at my lip and then looked upon the floor, feeling at a loss for words to make him feel any better.

“I was- I was going to have water,” I stammered out. “I keep coughing.”

“I heard you.”

“In a couple more hours I’ll take some more medicine for this headache. You will probably want some for the pain.”

“The doctor gave me something,” he softly hushed. Teddy sat up on the couch more to see more clearly. “Have you any tea?”

“I have herbal tea, yeah. Is mint tea fine enough for you?”

“Perfect,” he mouthed out slowly. I went over to the kettle to fill it up with water. The mugs clashed and clanged as I tried to find one that would suit him. Teddy had such elegant things in his home, and I feared my own belongings were a pitiful downgrade. Once I settled on a teal grey mug with thin white lines stretched across it, I set it down next to the kettle with a satisfied air. “I can’t sleep,” sounded behind me. “You mind if you stay with me for a bit?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I said over my shoulder, though I felt uneasy at the thought of it. The decision to sleep away from him was already hard enough, but then again our relationship status was a little undefined at the moment. I knew that Teddy needed a friend, someone he could talk to, and that I would be the perfect person.

I looked down at my long white nightgown with a deep V-neck at the front. I pulled up the shoulders more, hoping it would not be too revealing once I sat down beside him. I could feel my cheeks blush, a sense of shame at the amount of attraction I still felt towards him. The entire notion of me liking him had come upon me so suddenly, it was hard to determine when I first began to develop such strong feelings for him. The kettle popped, breaking me out of my deep reverie in a nonsensical way. I lifted up my favourite mug with a stencil of a forest around the entire cup; the tiny red fox poking its head out of the tree was the main instigator for me purchasing this item in the first place.

“You don’t add anything in your mint tea, do you?” I inquired with all politeness.

Teddy’s voice was clear as he replied: “No, not at all.”

Tea bags dropped inside of our mugs, and with a quick motion of my hand, hot water poured downwards into our medium-sized cups. The faint scent of mint filled the air, a welcome fragrance after an extremely long night with the firefighters and then the ambulance workers that inspected the cuts across Teddy’s waist and right arm. He even had to go to the hospital to get a certain wound stitched up. It was difficult to explain why we simply didn’t escape the fire using the front door, but who would ever believe our story if we told them the truth? There was no one in the world that would believe that the former mistress of that house still haunted this place, not even myself if I had not seen it with my own two eyes.

Sometime later I took a seat beside Teddy, offering him a hot cup of tea to cheer up his spirits. A tiny smile graced his handsome face for me, but it could not linger there for too long. “Thank you,” he mumbled with a great deal of difficulty.

I laid my mug down on the table so I could give Teddy my full attention. He watched me cross my legs upon the couch before I pulled the patterned butterfly blanket over myself as well. “I’m sorry about your house.”

“Nothing can be done,” he uttered in a sorrowful way.

“I know how much you loved it.”

“The minute I was done with boarding school, I could not wait to return there,” he remarked with his eyes fixated on the plain white ceiling. “I wanted to be home again, but then I didn’t. I knew she was there waiting for me, all those years trapped inside that house.” He tilted his head to the left, taking in my side profile. “You must understand that she was all I had growing up.”

“It’s why she didn’t want to let you go,” I said in a comforting way.

“My father was a monster, or the closest thing to it. He didn’t love her.” He turned his attention to the empty coffee table where only his wallet and my newly done self-portrait rested in the center of it. “Everyone knew he married her for money,” he blurted out harshly. “And security, and with my mother’s good looks, it was a tempting thing to secure for him.”

“And he made your life miserable,” I knowingly said.

He nodded his head sharply. His soft pink lips pressed together firmly while he squinted his eyes a little bit. I could tell he was holding a lot of emotions back, but for once he seemed unable to control them.

“Sela,” he began. “I am not my father.”

“I never thought you were.”

“After he killed her,” he continued. “He walked all the way to the cliffs, a little ways past the area that you and I sat at today. And then he flung himself over.”

“That is why you got so mad,” I realized. “When I had asked you about the steepness of the drop.”

“Memories,” he hushed. “I can never escape them.”

“No one can.” I reached downwards and settled my hand over his upper thigh. “We just find a way to move on from them.” He watched me stroke my hand from side to side, and then glanced upwards to see the warm smile I gave only for him. “I’ll help you.”

His chin lowered to the top of his chest, a subtle gesture that revealed so much about his inner turmoil. “I never meant to put you in harm’s way,” he quietly revealed. “All those times when you were in my house I knew that you were safe as long as it was daylight. My mother only reveals herself fully at night. That is the reason I never see Luna once the sun goes down. There are two sides of my mother, you see, almost two remnants of her spirit. The one upstairs whom I can reason with - the one that closely resembles my mother when she was still alive.” He paused for a moment. “And then there is the other tortured side of her… the one down in the depths of the cellar.” His lips contorted downwards harshly. “She must have sensed you were inside the house, and then…” He shook his head grievously. “I should have never kept you around at so late an hour.”

“It’s alright, Teddy,” I reassured him.

He laid a hand on top of mine, gripping it tenderly with his thumb stroking the back of my hand. “Do you forgive me?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“But you almost died back there,” he reminded me. “If it wasn’t for me breaking the glass.”

“And so would you,” I pointed out. “The smoke or the fire would have gotten us in the end. But Teddy, why did she react that way?”