As soon as I get to the office Monday morning, I dial Mitch’s number, practicing my casual face in the reflection on my computer monitor. Cool as a cucumber, that’s me.

He picks up on the first ring again. “Hello?”

God, that voice. So much for cucumbers. Now I’m red hot chili pepper all the way.

I have seriously got to talk to him about toning it down. This is getting to be a problem.

“It’s Jenna.”

“Oh, hi.” He sounds happy to hear from me, so that’s good. “What’s up?”

“Oh, you know, not much. Work and stuff.” Such a brilliant conversationalist. I’m sure I’m knocking his socks off.

“I’ve got about one minute before I have to be on set,” he says, “and I really can’t talk.” He sounds a little regretful, though, which is gratifying. “Can I call you back? Or did you call for something specific?”

“Oh!” I guess I should have thought about this before actually dialing the phone. Instead, I wing it. “I just wanted to say I meant what I said. I’d like us to be friends.”

And that’s all I want.

“So you said.”

“Well, I meant it,” I say. “Like we could have lunch, and that kind of thing. I liked spending time with you.”

That’s the truth. It doesn’t mean I have to date him. All the things I liked about him I can enjoy just as well if I’m his friend.

Except the phenomenal kissing. But I’m not thinking about that.

“I’d like that,” he says. “I really enjoyed your company.”

I’m much happier than the situation calls for, but I decide not to evaluate that right now.

“Would you like to have lunch later this week?” he asks.

I wince. “Okay, this is going to sound like I’m putting you off, but I swear I’m really not,” I begin.

“I hardly think you would make a special point of calling me just to blow me off.”

That’s heartening, at least. “This is a horrid week at work. I have meetings every day that will make it impossible to go anywhere for lunch. In fact, Wednesday is the only day I don’t have a meeting during lunch.”

“That’s too bad,” he says. “Is your job usually like this?”

“No, definitely not. If it were, I’d quit. I’m not a fan of the cafeteria here,” I joke. “I kind of really enjoy food.”

“I know,” he says.

“Well, if you know any lunch places that are as good as your dinner places, I’m in,” I say. “As soon as I’ve got a little breathing room around here, I can meet you wherever.”

“It’s a deal. I really have to run,” he says apologetically. “Why don’t I call you at home later, and we can figure out when you might be able to get free.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” I say, which is nothing but the absolute truth. The cowboy boots—and everything else—don’t matter. It’s different somehow if we’re going to be just friends. You don’t have to be embarrassed about your friends. In fact, I think everyone needs one or two really quirky pals. My new soap opera actor friend will fit right in with my weirdo soap opera fan friend.

It’s a perfect arrangement.

And when Kari calls later that morning, I’m able to tell her with absolute honesty that Mitch and I touched base but didn’t make any firm plans. Hopefully that will hold her for a while.

* * *

I half-expect that Mitch might not call after all—he wouldn’t be the first guy to say I’ll call you and not follow through. But the phone rings at nine o’clock, just as I’m settling in on the chaise with my well-worn copy of Pride & Prejudice.

“Hey!” he says, by way of greeting. “Glad I caught you. I called earlier and you weren’t home.”

“I stayed at work till seven-thirty,” I say, dogearing my page and tossing the book on the coffee table. “And I’m sure as my deadline looms larger, I’ll pull plenty of late nights. But let’s not talk about my job, please. I just ate.”

“What did you have?”

“My specialty: takeout. What’d you have?”

“Pizza. What a couple of culinary defectives.”

“I can cook, I just prefer not to.” I lean back against the arm of the chaise and tug the throw over my bare legs.

“I’m a damn good cook,” he says, “but I don’t usually bother with it for just me.”

“Sure you are. Guys say they can cook, and then when push comes to shove they mean they can heat up a can of Spaghetti-Os.”

“You wound me,” he says dramatically. “I can certainly do better than a can of Spaghetti-Os. I’ll show you sometime.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Okay, Betty Crocker, it’s a deal. I’ll bring the can opener.”

“Ha ha,” he says. “Very funny. This from the woman who just admitted she specializes in takeout.”

“Touché.”

“What kind?” he asks.

“What kind of what?”

“Takeout. What kind did you have?”

“Indian,” I say. “Chicken tikka masala.” It’s literally the most boring, white-people food you can get in an Indian restaurant, but I like it.

“Speaking of food, we were going to make lunch plans,” he reminds me.

“Yeah,” I say. “About that—”

“No big deal. If you can’t manage it, we’ll get together when work slows down. I know my gig isn’t the same, but it does go through those cycles of too much to do followed by nothing to do.”

“I suppose,” I say, considering this. “I suppose a job is a job is a job, right?”

“Yeah. Maybe there’s an exception or two, but not many.”

“Well, if you don’t mind waiting, I can call you when my job isn’t killing me,” I say. “I suppose it will be a few weeks.”

“That’s no good,” he says emphatically. “You’ll have forgotten who I am by then.”

“I don’t think that’s likely.” As if. “You do make an impression.”

“Must be my boyish good looks.”

The deadpan delivery is absolutely perfect. I can’t help but laugh, which I hate to do on the phone. I always worry that I sound stupid or that I’m too loud, or any number of other creative worries that I come up with on the spur of the moment.

“You should have been a comedian,” I say.

“Like stand-up? No way. No money in it.”

“Forgive me for being presumptuous, but you can’t be breaking the bank at Midnight Confessions—or can you?”

“It’s enough,” he says simply. “And they were very glad to get me. I have all I need.”

“So you’re happy there?”

“I am. I could be doing something I like a lot less,” he says, and even over the phone, I can tell he’s grinning.

“You don’t seem the sort to stick with something unpleasant.” I poke around the edges of why he left his last job, wondering if he’ll tell me anything I can tell Kari.

“Well, now,” he says, slowly, “that depends on how you define unpleasant. In between roles, I’ve been known to go home and do roofing, or construction. Some people would call that unpleasant.”

“Construction? Like building houses?”

“No, like building roads, and highways.”

“And roofing? I assume you’re not talking about a career in Rohypnol?”

This time he’s the one laughing. I beam, very pleased with myself.

“No, definitely not. Shingles. Ripping them up, nailing them down.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“I like it. I like being out in the sun, and I like working with my hands.”

It’s interesting thinking about someone working like that, using their strength and their body to build something. I mean, obviously, I know that things don’t just build themselves. And we do have ironworkers and so forth in New York; I just don’t know any of them. My circle of friends is made up pretty much exclusively of office types: a little pasty, not used to anything more physically demanding than walking down to the water cooler.

Come to think of it, I don’t even do that anymore. Ryan brings me whatever I need. That’s awful! I don’t even go to the water cooler for myself?

“So, you still want to hear about my job?” he asks. “The indoors one.”

I snuggle a little lower on the chaise, fighting a telltale heaviness in my eyelids. I’m having too much fun to go to sleep now. “Very much.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about soaps.”

“You and Kari couldn’t be more different, could you?” he asks. “She already knows so much about everything that there wasn’t much I could tell her. I think she was disappointed.”

“Well, I won’t be, because I’m a complete neophyte,” I say. “I guess … just tell me how the day goes for you.”

“On a normal day, I show up at eight, check for green sheets—those are last minute script changes. You want to look at those first thing, because sometimes there are a lot of them.”

“They change things that far along?” I ask, incredulous.

“All the time.”

“And you have to learn new lines? For that day?”

“All the time.”

“That’s no way to run a business!”

“Sure it is,” he says. It’s the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“But it must be so hard.”

“It’s my job.”

I think about it for a minute. I guess he’s right, but I’m glad it’s not my job, because it sounds like it would make me crazy. I like to know how things are going to happen.

It would be nice to be more like him. Laid back, easygoing, not worrying so much about it.

“It really doesn’t bother you?” I ask.

“It really doesn’t. All I’ve ever wanted was to be an actor; I’m not going to start pitching tantrums because I have too much new dialogue to learn.”

“But isn’t it hard?”

“A little,” he says. “But what isn’t? I think of it as a challenge.”

“That’s awesome.”

“Nah.” He sounds embarrassed. “It’s just the only way to think. Anyone who’s going to get upset about a thing like that should maybe find another job.”

“I’m feeling like such a baby now,” I say.

“What?”

“Maybe I should stop bitching about my job and just do it, you know? You make a lot of good points.”

“Now wait a minute,” he says. “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me. I doubt it’s the same thing.”

“Isn’t it, though?” I ask.

“No, I really don’t think it is. I’m talking about people who act, who audition to be on a soap opera, and then complain about the workload. Soap acting is hard. You have practically no time to learn lines, no time to rehearse, you shoot in one take unless someone screws up. People know this going in, so cry me a river if it’s too much for you, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, slowly, “but with me—”

“You told me yourself, your job isn’t usually this crazy, right? So if you’re a little overwhelmed when it took a turn for the crazier, how is that the same?”

“It’s not?”

“Exactly.” Then he laughs. “I guess I’m done lecturing.”

“Good,” I say. “So, after the green sheets?”

“Blocking in the morning. We run lines to be sure we haven’t forgotten anything, and to make sure the new dialogue works. There’s some ‘You stand there, you stand there, turn this way, hold that look till we cut.’ Then in the afternoon, makeup, then shooting. One take, like I said, unless something goes wrong—and, even then, it has to go really wrong.”

“One take,” I repeat. That’s insane.

“Yeah,” he says. “Today actually went great, no retakes on anything. I was out an hour early.”

“What did you shoot?”

He hesitates. “You know, I’m not supposed to tell you that. If you told Kari, it would be on the internet in a matter of seconds.”

That shuts me up. I’d like to protest that I would never tell Kari, but of course that would be a flat-out lie. And for some reason lying to him isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. “You shouldn’t assume I’ll tell her things just because she’s my friend,” I say.

There. That’s not a lie. It’s a smokescreen.

“Fair enough,” he says. “You guys have been friends for a long time?”

“Since we were seven.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“I ran over her with my bike.” I haven’t thought about that in years.

“Literally?”

“Yeah. Just her legs, though. She was lying in this little depression in the grass at the park, and I could barely see over the handlebars—and then—wham!”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Thanks a lot, I’m going to catch hell for getting dirt on these pants.’ To which I replied, ‘Hey, they were dirty before I showed up.’”

He laughs. “Your first fight.”

“The first of many,” I say. “She’s the best friend I’ve ever had, but we do fight an awful lot. Two strong personalities.”

“I’ll say.”

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that,” I tell him. “Your turn to talk.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Your first part,” I say. “What was it?”

“Grade six. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

“Were you Charlie?”

“I was not,” he says. “I was Augustus Gloop. Big orange inflatable life vest under my clothes to make me fat, with my little sixth-grade toothpick legs sticking out from underneath. The chocolate river was a four-foot high piece of painted plywood, and when I fell in—which meant sort of diving around the side of it—I knocked it over.”

I’m laughing out loud now, imagining it.

“It’s not funny,” he says. “It wasn’t the highlight of my career, that’s for sure.”

“What was the highlight of your career?”

“I did an amazing indie film about four brothers coming to their father’s funeral. Once the funeral is over they go back to the house they grew up in to divide up their dad’s stuff, and they get wasted and end up fighting and having to face their past and the things that haunt them.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“It was really draining, and totally worth doing. I’d love to be in another movie like that.” He’s quiet for a moment. “But the gig I’ve got now is good.”

I ask him some more questions about the movie, and then he tells me about the first movie he was in, a bit part that ended up on the cutting room floor. Then he asks me some more questions about my family and growing up, and I ask him about his family. We swap questions back and forth, and I lose track of time completely.

It’s so odd to be the focus of this kind of attention; Drew and I were living together in what I thought was a real, serious relationship, and we didn’t talk to each other like this. He didn’t want to know this much about me after three years.

It occurs to me, in a very solid and real way that I haven’t quite felt before, that Drew is a real asshole.

Mitch has known me for a week, and he wants to know absolutely everything; the story of how I met Kari isn’t the only distant memory I find myself digging up.

Finally, when I feel like I’m really going to doze off if we keep talking, I check out the clock on the DVD player. It’s ten minutes to midnight.

“Oh, my God, Mitch, I have to go,” I say. “I have to be up at seven.”

“So do I,” he says. “We’re idiots for staying up like this.”

I feel a little hurt—I’ve loved our talk, and the time flew by. “Are you sorry we did?” I ask.

“Not a bit. I do idiotic things all the time—keeps me from getting boring.”

“I highly doubt that you could ever be boring.”

“I try,” he says. “But no matter how un-boring I am, or this conversation is, we have to go to bed.”

I shiver—literally shiver—at those words, because hearing them delivered in his warm, honey-smooth voice is …

Well, it’s something, that’s for sure.

“Call me tomorrow?” I ask recklessly.

“You serious?”

“Dead serious. I can’t stay up this late again, but call me tomorrow night and I’ll think of some other cool questions to ask you.”

“All right.” His voice takes on an interesting upbeat lilt, and I suspect that he’s got one of those heart-stopping grins on his face. “I will.”

“I can’t wait,” I say. “Good night.”

“Night,” he says, and hangs up.

I look at the phone for a second, more than a little surprised. Where did the time go?

Well, wherever it went, it was worth it. This is the first time in weeks I’ve gone this long without thinking about work. It feels great.

I head toward the bedroom, wearing a huge grin of my own.