Page 24 of Juliet's Echo
I was midway through my own notes when Kenya tapped my shoulder and pointed three seats over with her pen. I followed the direction and my eyes landed on Juliet, who was already watching me with a smug expression like I owed her money.
I hadn't clocked it earlier, but the denim shorts and fitted Havenbrook Lions graphic tee she had on fit her frame well. Those hips spilled over the waistband, and the shirt might as well have been latex around her chest. Her stomach, not flat, pushed out just enough — and paired with that slice of cake sitting in this bag, told me everything I needed to know. BrattyAss liked to eat. That shit was sexy to me. I'd murder that pussy on her fun-sized ass.
Her brown Fendi slides revealed freshly pedicured toes, that precise white line sitting clean across the top of each one, making them all suckable.
The thoughts hit harder than I anticipated and I felt my manhood begin to swell. I had to physically shift in my seat, jaw tight, forcing my mind back to the annotated pages in front of me — but the damage was already done. My man had other plans, and these thin-ass basketball shorts were never built to keep a secret like that. I kept my eyes fixed forward, completely still, running through every uninteresting thing I could think of until the situation became manageable enough for me to exist in a classroom like a reasonable human being.
It took a minute.
Whatever crossed my face during that process must have been readable, because when I finally trusted myself enough to glance back over, Juliet's smug expression had shifted into something closer to genuine confusion.
"What?" I mouthed, pretending to be annoyed.
"Where my cake, nigga?" she mouthed back.
Her disability strengthened her ability — she could read lips and articulate so masterfully that she could hold a whole silent conversation across a room and you'd understand every word them pretty lips were saying. I held the Flip'd bag up slightly in her direction.
"Give it here," she mouthed.
"Say please," I shot back.
She sucked her teeth — loud enough apparently, because Hamburger stopped mid-sentence and looked her way.
"Did I say something incorrectly, Ms. Everette?" he smiled.
She shook her head no, smiling and signing "sorry." You could tell the professor lived and breathed literature — no matter the interruption he picked the lecture back up flawlessly.
"Tell daddy please and you can have it," I mouthed when her eyes found mine again.
Juliet rolled her eyes and hit me with the most unimpressed expression she could conjure. She looked back down at her notes — but I caught the slight cut of her eyes back in my direction and the faint smile that tugged at the corner of her lips before she could kill it.
I faced forward. I wasn't ready to let her see just how turned on I was.
The class moved into Act Three — Iago's manipulation, Othello's descent, the machinery of jealousy dismantling a man who should have known better. Hamburger was a troublemaker in the best sense. He found genuine joy in engineering chaos out of a classroom discussion. With sixty-three percent of his students competing to maintain favor and a 3.5 GPA or higher, all he had to do was throw out one loaded question, step back, and watch what happened.
"Othello's tragedy is a failure of self-knowledge," Juliet answered. "He never really trusted Desdemona — he trusted the image of himself as someone who deserved her. The moment that image cracked, he folded. Iago didn't destroy his love for Desdemona — to be more precise, he destroyed his ego. Love was never Othello's foundation."
She settled back in her chair.
Hamburger raised his eyebrows in quiet appreciation. I let her sit in her glory, basking in the silent applause from our classmates.
Then — "That's a harsh observation," I said out loud. I couldn't help it.
"It's an accurate observation," she shot back. Juliet did not like to be challenged. Not even slightly. Nobody in the class would dare push back on her analysis — whether out of fear of her wrath or the very real awareness that she had people positioned all throughout this campus. I for one was going to enjoy drawing the brat out of her for public display.
"It's accurate," I said, "but incomplete. Not to mention one-sided."
"Mr. Mitchel — tell us more," Hamburger's messy ass said, leaning back with a devilish grin. He knew exactly where this was going.
"Othello's ego wasn't constructed in a place of isolation. The man was Black in Venice — a predominantly white society — who against all odds, rose to a position of power. Iago used that and exploited it. He didn't just expose Othello's insecurities — he deliberately weaponized them. The insecurity that he was never quite enough, that failure was always one step behind him — Iago didn't create that. Society did. Iago just used it as his blueprint. That's not just ego. That's a man who internalized what the world told him about himself and never fully healed from it,” I confidently continued.
Silence.
The whole class — Hamburger included — turned to look at Juliet. Her body stiffened. She dropped her pen and sat forward in her seat.
For a second, she didn't move.
Damn, little mama. Giving up that easily?
