Vs Reality by Blake Northcott

scared the shit out of me. But it was amazing . And for the first time in forever, I actually felt…”
    “Alive?” Dia cuts in. She angles her handheld mirror towards him, peeking at him in the reflection.
    Cole glances back at her but didn’t say a word. He could see from the spark in her eye that he doesn’t need to – she feels the same way. “So you’re saying that I pop one of these Muse pills and I go back to the way I was: the muscles, the tattoos…?”
    “That’s right,” Brodie says. “Pop a pill and you’re a superhero. It’s that easy.”
    Cole turns back towards Dia. “So why didn’t you take one?”
    “Sorry?” She snaps her compact close, sending a small plume of flesh-colored powder into the surrounding air.
    “In the alley,” Cole asks. “You didn’t take one of those Muse pills. You pulled out and a knife and sliced—”
    “Right, right…” She says quickly. She nervously adjusts her wrist straps – the leather bands that conceal the scarred flesh beneath. “I thought I had one in my purse, but I didn’t. Turns out I left my stash here in the penthouse so I had to improvise.”
    Paige’s stoic, porcelain doll face creases into a small frown. She opens her mouth but whatever she’s about to say is cut off by a ringing phone.
    Everyone pats themselves down, trying to detect the source of the ringtone. It’s Cole’s.
    “Who is it?” Paige asks flatly, rudely.
    Cole glances at his device. Jens’s ridiculous smiling face winks onto his camera’s display screen, a wave of blond hair flopping over one eye. “A friend.”
    “That guy you were at the club with?” Dia asks. The phone continues to ring.
    “Yeah, he’s probably wondering where I disappeared to.”
    Paige bolts from her seat and clutches Cole’s wrist before he even notices she’s standing. “Put it on speaker,” she says, with a sharp inflection that lets him know that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
    Another ring.
    “All right…” Cole says nervously.
    He pressed his thumb into the speaker icon.
    “Hey buddy,” Cole says, his eyes still fixed on Paige’s. “So…how are things?”
    “Good, good,” Jens replies after a small throat-clearing cough. “Look, um, the Buick has a flat and I need some help changing the spare. I’m useless with this type of thing, and if I don’t get her home before sunrise my dad is going to lose it .”
    “Sure. Where are you?”
    “The warehouse behind Platinum. I rolled her in here to get her off the streets. Didn’t want to risk getting towed.”
    Paige reaches out and pressed her thumb into Cole’s phone, tapping the mute button.
    “Does he normally sound like this?” she asks, as if it’s a perfectly normal question.
    “Does he sound like a human male in his early 20s?” Cole says, leaning back in his seat. “Yes…I suppose so?”
    “His pitch, his cadence, his overall tone,” Paige fumes, leaning uncomfortably close. “Does he normally talk like that or not? Is it unusual?”
    “I don’t know!” Cole says defensively, pitching as far back in his recliner as the chair will allow. “Sure. Maybe?”
    “Come on,” Dia says, rising from her chair. “ Relax , Paige. We don’t know that Jens is with them.”
    “We don’t know that he’s not, ” she fires back. “You’ve already done more than enough tonight so let me handle this, all right?”
    Who would Jens possibly be with, Cole wonders. And why would it matter?
    Paige clasps Cole’s hand again, harder this time, polished black fingernails biting his wrist. “Ask him about the road trip the two of you took to Atlantic City last summer. Ask him about the flat you had during that trip. Be specific.”
    “O…okay,” Cole stammers. He considers protesting, but that’s the only word he produces.
    He draws in a shaky breath and taps the mute button, resuming the call.
    “Hello?” Jens asks for the third time. “You still there, man?”
    “Hey, buddy. Sorry, bad