The Color of Darkness COMPLETE NOVEL

Love

If that night taught me anything, it was that I had no idea what love really was.

While our relationship had certainly developed in one direction, it seemed to stay very much the same in many other ways. We spent the next month in a haze of studying, goofing off, narrowly avoiding trouble, and all of the other stuff we usually did with Rick. The occurrence in front of the fire on Christmas seemed to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience by late February, as nothing even remotely similar happened between us since then, not even a kiss. Rick seemed to sense something was amiss and though he didn't force me to talk about it, he did his best to keep the three of us busy enough with our typical ill-conceived activities to keep my mind off it.

It was a Friday evening a few days before March when Nova called Rick and I over to her house and demanded that we help her with some sort of project. I waited until I heard Rick's truck pull up on the street outside to step into the dry late-winter cold and meet him on the sidewalk outside of Nova's place. He looked incredibly annoyed when I approached him, barely waiting for me to catch up before beginning his rant about Nova's "lack of boundaries" and how "demanding" she could be. Though I couldn't help but agree with him (especially with the boundaries thing), Rick wasn't usually one to get so upset over something like that.

"What's got you all twisted up?" I asked as we hiked up the driveway to the front door.

"I was in the middle of something important," he grumbled. His cheeks were flushed and our breath hung in the air for several seconds before dissipating.

We had hardly even knocked once when Nova yanked open the door and dragged us--quite literally--straight to her room. She slammed the door a little too hard and began pacing in front of us, talking fast enough to involve some very wild hand gestures into her very sudden and violent explanation.

"So, unless you actually pay attention--which I know you don't--you wouldn't be aware of the fact that I bit the bullet and signed up for a photography class this semester. I mean, why the hell not? I've got the equipment and after forcing Puck to get back into writing, I decided I should probably throw myself out there so I'm not a complete ass, right? So the teacher, Ms. Carpenter, assigned us all our projects at the beginning of the semester so we had plenty of time to plan them out. Sounds like a nice thing to do, right?"

"Sure," Rick said with shrug. I just sat there wondering how any of it involved Rick and I, and trying to avoid remembering what had taken place only just a few hours after the last time I had been in Nova's room.

"Wrong!" Nova cried, throwing her hands up into the air. "I've been so swamped in all my other classes that I completely forgot that we've got an assignment due on Monday worth twenty-five percent of my grade! Do you have any idea what this'll do to my grades if I don't do a decent job? I'm totally fucked!"

"Alright, calm the hell down," Rick said, looking at me for help.

I just looked at him blankly, considering to myself possible reasons why Nova had been yet again pretending nothing had happened between us. I was finding myself wondering things like this whenever I saw her now, and it's wasn't doing anything for my already-short attention span. Rick rolled his eyes at me and turned back to Nova. \

"What's the project, and how do you want us to help?"

"I have to show what love means to me in one photo with only one paragraph to explain! I mean, could this project be any more impossible to bullshit?" My ears perked up at the mention of love.

"How about I just take a picture of you two gettin' it on or something?" Rick said it with such a straight face that I was afraid he was serious for a second. Nova hit him square in the face with an empty can of Code Red from the other side of her bedroom.