Shower Me With Kisses

“Uck!” Aurora scoffs. “Get that shit out of my face, Lake.”
I giggle and put the hard seltzer down before tugging on my favorite jeans. I like them best because they make my ass look smaller than it really is. Unlike Stella, I don’t like my curves. “It’s like a pina colada or a bay breeze. Everyone loves the pineapple flavor. It’s like summer in a can,” I say, but she refuses to try even a sip.
Aurora reaches for the tangerine variety because it’s tangy like her.
With her fire engine red hair, arm tats and piercings, her name might mean dawn, but Aurora is more like the mistress of the night. The eldest of triplet girls, she and her sisters are my roommates.
Aurora, Stella, Luna, and I live together in a two bed, two bath apartment on the campus of Tulane University in Louisiana. It’s not where any of us wanted to go to school, yet here we are living in swank cluster housing for our second year.
I’m from the north where we only see gators behind glass at a zoo. Growing up in a much different culture than the deep south was jarring when I first arrived, but it could be worse. I could live in a cramped dorm room with a psycho for a roommate confined in a four-by-four space. At least the four of us became fast best friends after their father and my brother introduced us.
The co-ed building we’re in is like a luxury apartment with study lounges, kitchenettes, laundry facilities, and air conditioning. It’s convenient, sought-after living for students. The four of us were granted these accommodations because of who we’re related to.
The triplets’ father is the head football coach, and my brother is one of his star players. Perks come our way all the time, but there’s a lot of bullshit, too.
The trips, as their parents still call them, needed a fourth to live with.
Coach Piccone is very protective of his girls and didn’t want them living with just anyone. He thinks his three little trips are angels. If he only knew.
Anyway, I needed housing and Forrest is just as protective over me, so it was an easy sell when his coach approached him with the idea. Forrest also thinks I’m innocent. The only difference is, he’s right.
Or he was, until recently.
It wasn’t my choosing, and that innocence was wrecked the night of my eighteenth birthday on New Year’s Eve a year ago, but he doesn’t have a clue. Telling my brother I lost my virginity to his best friend the minute I turned eighteen isn’t something I plan on doing anytime soon.
Luna, with her refreshing watermelon seltzer in hand, stares at her reflection in the mirror while running her long brown strands through a flat iron. “Can you still see the bruising?” she asks.
“Nah,” I say. “Your concealer covers them.”
Luna had a nose job and just got the bandages off a few days back.
First, it was lip injections, and now this. She claims she’s always hated her nose, and her lips were nonexistent. Being identical to her two sisters, no one believes a word of that noise.
“Is it noticeable?” she asks.
“What?” Stella, triplet number three, asks. “That you hacked off a good portion of your face. Nah, not at all.”
Stella turns and rolls her eyes at her sisters and me, then blows her blonde bangs out of her eyes.