Polite society and happy endings do not live here. Only the heavy stillness, the shadows, and the rot in the ribcage and the floorboards. Nothingness. Proceed with caution.

She pulled the door open, only to find him standing there, staring with his mouth agape. She waited, but when he failed to introduce himself, she spoke first. It took a second prompt to finally snap him out of his daze.

He had expected a matronly owner, like the others, not this young woman who had answered the door—surely nothing more than an employee, he reasoned.

He fumbled through his briefcase as if it had infinite capacity, while she stood there in the silence.

When he finally pulled out a slightly bent business card and asked for Beatrice before she confirmed her identity. The meeting finally lurched into motion, weighed down by his obvious lack of preparation.

It was an amateurish display. He had one job, and he was failing at the basic requirements of it.

He started his charm offensive soon after the meeting, trying to befriend her with a barrage of calls and meal invitations like they were all part of the standard professional networking, but those work-related excuses were just as thin as his self-perceived charm.

She finally ran out of excuses after dodging his invitations for weeks.

Lunch meetings were just part of the job, but she knew this one would be different. There was something about it—an instinct she couldn't ignore—that told her it wouldn't be business as usual.

Still, it was only lunch—not a lingering five-course dinner or a chummy happy hour. She’d give him an hour, then excuse herself and get back to the office.

The lunch meetings with him were a drag for Beatrice. He had little interest in the minutiae of trade; every conversation was a detour back to his own ego, where the agenda was consistently himself.

He spun a story of patrician burdens, gloating as if caught in an old-money Greek tragedy, while simultaneously boasting of a sumptuous fleet of cars - though he was careful to park them somewhere unseen by Beatrice.

He was the ultimate dissembling heir, posturing as a man of grit while flaunting a pedigree - albeit a counterfeit one.

He kept returning to the tired cliché of insisting she was the very doppelgänger of a lost love. He reiterated it at every meeting since their first encounter, always with that same monotonous fervor.

Just add hot water and wait three minutes—because apparently, intimacy can be instantly manufactured, like a cup of noodles, just by throwing in the story of an ex-flame doppelgänger. The sheer absurdity of it all was lost on him. He had actually thought she would be flattered.

He had probably recycled the line so many times that nearly every woman he passed on the street would look like his ex by now.

She met his boasts with a stony countenance that no amount of posturing could pierce. She remained entirely unimpressed, denying him the fawning admiration he clearly expected.

During one so-called meeting, he veered off topic to drone on about one of the cars he owned.

Beatrice tried to be polite, stifling her yawns, but he caught her indifference—there wasn’t a shred of awe in sight. He stopped mid-narrative, his ego stung and demanded to know if she understood anything about cars at all.

Seeing right through him, she opted for a touch of sarcastic innocence.

“Of course I know about cars. I can tell the difference between a car and a lorry." She delivered the line with a deadpan sweetness, the absurdity of her answer cut through his pomposity.

His act fell flat, catching dirt and sand instead of the admiration he’d been so desperately fishing for. She had thoroughly thwarted it. It wasn’t a scenario he’d prepared for, and he was stunned into silence.

He sat there looking foolish, frantically running an unpracticed reconnaissance inside his head to figure out where he’d gone wrong.

At first, the contacts were tolerable. She’d answer his calls only for work details, then hang up the second she had what she needed or simply let the phone ring out.

But the check-ins grew constant and intrusive, as if he expected her to account for her every move like a lover. She snapped at him with blunt, cold rebukes, yet he only doubled down. He’d wait a few days, then call again as if nothing had been said, or send another dinner invitation with that same expectant, shameless tone.

He treated her resistance like part of some courtship.

The red flags were everywhere when his subordinate arrived to finalize the deal.

The employee was professional but unsettlingly deferential - not out of standard courtesy, but because he had spoken of her as if she were his prize.

It was later revealed that he had some special instructions to the staff to take good care of her - marking her as his protected interest rather than a client.

It was definitely not the VIP client kind of service.

His antics had turned the office into a pressure cooker of whispers; colleagues had them pegged for an affair, and her reputation was just another casualty of his unwanted attention. What was supposed to be a standard project had warped into some Fatal Attraction script she’d never asked for.

What annoyed her most was the way he kept bringing up the special treatment he’d shown her over the phone, obviously trying to beguile her into feeling indebted. If only she could reach through the screen and kick him where it hurt, finally ending that smugness right then and there.

By contrast, the shift in his subordinate was a relief. The man had once been stiff and unsettlingly deferential, but he had finally grown into a professional, mutual respect.

She didn't need to explain herself. She had managed to defuse the smoke and mirrors his boss tried to build, simply by the way she carried herself. It was only a matter of time.

By then, he was already history. She let every subsequent call ring out into the void; she didn't owe him a single second of her attention.

She stumbled across one of his posts while scrolling through her feed. He was posing with the look of someone attempting a thirst trap, muscular body and all—probably a practiced pose of his.

But wait, the reflection in the glass. Did anyone else catch that? The actual meat of this post?

A careless slip—one of those tiny details Beatrice usually caught. While others dismissed such things, they were always left baffled when she eventually joined the dots. She spotted the wrench he’d thrown into his own story—a narrative he was trying too hard to sell her.

Instead of luxury, it revealed the meager trappings of a common hearth: children’s cots and paltry goods from the common market.

It was a pedestrian existence - the life of a mere mortal, much like her own.

She was laughing so hard she was practically rolling on the floor. It wasn't that she was being mean or mocking his circumstances; it was just the sheer comedy of his pathetic performance.

No wonder she had been so unfeeling when he’d told his grand stories—details about him had actually jumped out at her long ago, though she hadn't realized why until now.

She had found the funniest joke of the season: a common mortal parading as an heir to an Olympian deity.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus!

He was no bachelor heir; he was a preening coxcomb, a fake mayor in a uniform stolen from the likes of Albrecht von Bauditz, parading a counterfeit life in hopes of bedding unsuspecting, impressionable women.

When she referred him to a peer for his services, he saw it as another opportunity to play his games, desperately trying to bait a reaction out of Beatrice.

He went so far as to purport that the said female had sought to entice him, attempting to lure him into her chamber for coffee- that hackneyed device where the brew is a mere cipher for something far less innocent. Anything but caffeine, yet intended to keep one up nonetheless.

He hath been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps, reciting a very bad script in a low-budget soap opera.

He staged a performance of the virtuous man resisting a wanton harlot, imagining this theatrical display would score him points with Beatrice.

He was blissfully unaware of what she already knew—namely, that both women were in communication. Painfully oblivious. It was a bizarre, dark comedy; watching him was equal parts amusing, disgusting, and utterly cringeworthy.

Yet, amidst the secondhand embarrassment, Beatrice remained entirely indifferent to the drama.

As entertaining as he was, she was far too busy to indulge the delusions of such a narcissist.

In the end, he was nothing more than a pathetic farce - a man-mountain of a lie who was, quite simply, full of shit.

With such a pompous air, one could scent his effluvium from a mile away.

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