A/N: I wrote this as an assignment for English class this year where we were supposed to make Hamlet into a novel. Enjoy! I most likely won't be finishing this and I can't believe there's a real clamor for Shakespeare fan fiction, but whatever. I thought it was a fun read.

Hamlet rose from the bed and sought out his pants from their discarded place on the floor. Ophelia stirred beside him and rose drowsily from the sheets.

She watched him as he pulled on his pants, zipped them up and grabbed his coat from where it lay on her armchair—the coat his wife had given him. Hamlet glanced up and gave her a half-smile.

She knew what that damn smile meant, too. Ophelia was no idiot. She knew that that smile meant she was good enough in bed to fool around with behind his wife's back, but she just wasn't wife material. Plus, Gertrude had too much money for Hamlet to ever walk away from her. Ophelia was a dirt poor graduate student and she knew it. But she couldn't fail to hope that one day Hamlet would come to realize just how perfect they were together—just like her advisor, Polonius, always told her.

He told her he loved her once, you know. No, not Polonius. The man was about seventy years old with one bad eye and a crooked nose and was not the type of material that a girl like Ophelia—fair, beautiful, goddess-material—would fall for. Hamlet did. Or at least he had inferred it. And Ophelia refused to believe that he could keep his heart of stone for much longer. After all, even if Gertrude had money, he didn't love her. He loved Ophelia! That had to count for something, right?

After what seemed like hours of silence, Hamlet glanced up from his cell phone screen once he was done checking his messages. "I humbly thank you. Well…" he spoke while striding over to the door of her apartment, clearly eager to just leave their affair as it was and continue on with their weekly rituals.

"My lord, I have remembrances of yours/ That I have longed long to redeliver. I pray you now receive them," she said confidently enough. Upon seeing Hamlet's face, though, she wished she could take it all back. He was livid.

"No, not I. I never gave you aught," he refused while shaking his head slowly, his floppy hair falling into his eyes.

Well, Ophelia thought, there's no going back now. I might as well finish what I've started and at least get a straightforward answer while I'm at it.

"My honored lord, you know right well you did, /And with them words of so sweet breath composed/ As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost, /Take these again, for to the noble mind/ Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. / There, my lord," she finished defiantly from her seated position on the bed. She jutted her chin out daring him to challenge her.

Pulling his keys from his pants pocket, Hamlet chuckled, "Ha, ha, are you honest?"

Puzzled by his words, she inquired timidly, "My lord?"

Hamlet sighed in frustration and repeated, "Are you fair?"

"What means your lordship?" Ophelia inquired; truly confused that he might ask her if she was speaking in jest. Of course she wasn't—this was an important matter!

Rolling his eyes, her lover spoke in a slow tone, his teaching tone, as though she were an imbecile freshman. "That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty."

Now Ophelia was just plain annoyed. Did he want her to forget the whole moment of his declaration? Impossible!

"Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?" she questioned impertinently.

Hamlet smiled nostalgically. "Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof." Then he sighed again in regret and admitted, "I did love you once."

Emboldened by his admission, Ophelia continued, "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so."

Hamlet shook his head, disappointed. "You should not have believed me," he confessed, "For virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it." He turned towards the door, ready to leave, reaching for the handle, when he stopped. He curled his hand into a fist, mere inches above the handle and hanging his head, declared, "I love you not."

Ophelia would not let the tears fall from her eyes just yet. She spoke, her voice wobbly at first, but growing stronger as she said, "I was the more deceived."

Hamlet raised his head as she spoke and stared determinately at the door. Putting as much scorn and annoyance as he possibly could into his voice he told her, "Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not bourne me: I am very proud," he conceded, "Revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father?"

It was as though he had slapped her across the face. He was telling her, in as few words, that if this was the way she was going to act—blowing things out of proportion, taking the littlest sentiment to heart and asking him to leave his wife—he was gone; he didn't have enough time in the day to deal with his mistress's troubles. And the father comment? Totally out of line! He knew her father was home-bound after he'd had that awful car accident. That was the reason they had gotten together in the first place.

After poor Laertes was hospitalized and in the intensive care unit for months, Ophelia's grades had started to drop and she was in danger of failing her English Lit class. One day following the rest of the students out, Hamlet had called her aside and asked her what was wrong. She had obliged, telling him everything about her father and how much he meant to her, etc. She'd cried, he'd hugged her and somehow they had ended up in a passionate embrace, kissing and the whole she-bang. And one thing had led to another and somehow they'd started this turbulent affair, which, two years later, had apparently gone nowhere except straight towards disaster.

"At home, my lord," she replied coldly.

"Let the doors be shut upon him that may play the fool nowhere but in 's own house." Grabbing the doorknob, yanking her door open, and stepping out into the hallway, he called over his shoulder, "Farewell," and snapped the door shut behind him.

At that moment Ophelia finally let the tears fall, but not for long. Hamlet wasn't worth crying over, that arrogant ass of a man. She refused to lament over the loss because really, what had she lost? A warm bed once a week? She'd buy a dog and have it all year long. And that went for the sloppy, wet kisses as well. Really, when she thought about it, Hamlet wasn't the perfect man she'd been searching for at all. She was over his once and for all. And it only took her three minutes.