9. Psalm Mitchel #2
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?
Then — "Those aren't mutually exclusive," she said, voice fully engaged.
"Internal fragility and external pressure compound each other.
I'm not excusing the system — I'm saying Othello was already too easily persuaded that he wasn't enough.
His status felt threatened the moment it was questioned.
Thought he was big shit because he was a Black man with power and a white woman in his bed.
The moment that image hurt his feelings, he fumbled. "
She finished with a roll of those beautiful eyes.
I didn't know what was sexier — her intelligence or the fact that she signed and verbalized her entire argument simultaneously.
Snap out of it, nigga. Before you lose this argument.
"Iago weaponized Othello's trust," I shot back — with a little more aggression than necessary.
"He was emotionally out of control and forgot who the fuck he was." She gave the aggression right back, and this time she slapped the desk when she finished her rebuttal. "He became the prey and lost the game — with his fragile-minded ass."
That made my dick twitch. One, because she was right. Two, because her mean ass refused to back down.
"Language, Ms. Everette," Hamburger said, as the class erupted around us.
"Sorry," she signed.
"Both of you are right," Hamburger said slowly, letting it settle.
"Both answers are strongly supported by personal interpretation and Shakespeare's text.
Hold onto them — and use them to answer your next reflection question.
" He paused. "Just without the profanity," he added, addressing the class with a smirk.
I glanced at her sideways as the lecture wound down. She was already writing in her notebook, body relaxed, energy completely settled — as if she hadn't just been ready to claw me to pieces two minutes ago.
Little passionate ass.
Shortly after, Hamburger released us with a writing assignment. "Everette, Mitchel," he pointed at us both with his stylus. "Great job today."
Without hesitation, I gathered my things, Juliet moving in my peripheral vision the entire time. We ended up side by side — honestly, by my own doing.
Looking at her up close, I noticed the natural flush of red in her chubby cheeks. Her eyelashes were naturally long and full. Then coconut and amber hit my nose — and was that raspberry underneath it all? A perfect mixture of sweet and velvet.
I lifted the bag with her slice of cake and she took it without a word.
"You know the actual Juliet was decisive, committed and in the end — wrong. Your mother named you right," I said. There was no way she was walking away with cake and a win.
"Juliet also had the most desired man drink poison to join her in death," she said pleasantly. "So whatever little joke you were trying to make — even when I'm wrong, I still get my point across." She smiled and walked ahead of me.
"You know she kills herself too, right?" I called to her back.
"Point still made," she said without turning around — lifting the Flip'd bag with one hand and her middle finger with the other.
I couldn't stand her ass.