Mr and Mrs Nemesis✔️

Bonus Chapter #2

Elijah Hendrix

Uni is hard. Like really fucking hard.

Living with Char... quite possibly more difficult. Tenfold.

That's not to say I regret my choice to ask her to move in with me. I'd been saving to put down a deposit on a flat months before her and I had even considered doing anything other than hating one another. By the time I paid the bond and had a few months rent in my savings, being there without her warned a different type of lonely. No - moving in with her is the best decision I ever made.

It isn't cheap, and it is far more responsibility that I dared to acknowledge beforehand, but I'm managing - we're managing. Sure, we've had to skip a few nights out and instead settled with quite nights in, and neither of us can afford the couples weekend away for Christmas in London. Plus if it weren't for mine and Lottie's student loans hitting our banks once every three months, we'd be totally on our arses, but I don't think I've stopped smiling since we got the keys. I know nothing has felt better than returning home to see Charlotte straightening the frames of the scattered pictures on the wall, paying extra attention to the one of my mum and I.

It's only been three months, and the place is still a working progress. Char seems to think that if she continues memorialising her favourite moments in picture frames and hanging them from the walls and propping them on spare surfaces, it'll give the place a slightly more homely feel. The pictures, along with the organisation of the dozens of pillows on our sofa, and the lay of the throw on the buffet, and the labelling of every fucking thing in our cupboards, tell me she's definitely her mother's daughter. God love Nancy, but her obsessiveness is exhausting. I can clearly see that is pasta in the jar without it being poured into a container with a restaurant type label on the front. Char was quick to order an identical set. Her obsessiveness is something more than that. Who knew that some pillows were meant to only be decorative? Looked at, but never laid on.

It seems with whatever she had left with her wage this month, she has bought us a few more tidbits today. It begins with a doormat - one I cannot help but grin at.

'Welcome-ish...
It depends who you are.'

With my uni books clutched beneath my arm, I use the other to knock open the door, sure to wipe my feet on the mat before I enter.

"Lottie?" I call out, placing everything on the table top just beside the door. Keys on the little hanger she had me screw to the wall, if only to save myself from the lecture when I undoubtedly misplace them. Again. Shoes on the rack. Coat on the hanger. And - "Lottie?" I call out again, closing the door and knocking on the latch.

By now, she should be here, grumbling about a lecturer or the fact her brothers are idiots or that Aria has learned a new swear word. The fact she isn't is slightly more than concerning. I mooch through the kitchen and peer around the archway to see her standing in the living room grinning like Hannibal Lecter, palms pressed together as though in prayer, fingertips grazing her nose.

"Good day, baby?" She asks.

My stomach falls out of my arsehole.

"What the hell have you done?" The facade drops and she hurries to me, brushing my shoulders as if to rid my t-shirt of lint. She avoids my eyes, brows high with feigned innocence.

"Can't I just be happy to see you?" She says, pressing a chaste kiss to the corner of my mouth. I grab at her wrists to stop her mithering and crouch slightly until her only option is to meet my pointed gaze.