The ABC studio is not remotely what I expected—even though I can’t quite figure out what it was that I expected.

For one thing, it’s very no-frills. The front lobby is nicely appointed, with a security guard at the front desk, but once he clears me, and Mitch takes me through the doors into the studio proper, there’s grime everywhere, and exposed wiring.

For another it’s tiny, which makes sense, I suppose, given the cost of real estate in Manhattan. None of the sets seem to be actual full-size rooms; it’s all just pieces of room. A corner here, a flat wall there. As a result, they’ve got something like 25 distinct “rooms” occurring in a space only about three times as big as my apartment. There’s a bar set, which is really just one wall with a bar long enough for four stools. I assume this is where Luis works—or his character, rather—and Mitch confirms.

“But he’s not on today,” he says, leading me past that set and onto another one no more than three steps away.

“I saw you kissing your stepsister, right there,” I say, pointing to an enormous marble fireplace mantle. “It looked like you were in, like, a big elaborate living room.”

“It’s all camera tricks,” he says.

As a couple of burly guys move cameras into place, I see for myself. Everything is angled to hide the fact that walls top out at about six feet, and staircases don’t go anywhere. Furniture is brought from somewhere to fill out the fireplace room—this is the Ratcliffe living room, I’m told. I recognize a couple of the other sets as well, from my abortive attempt to watch on Monday.

Mitch introduces me to the actress who plays Cassie, a gorgeous brunette named Martina with a thick New Jersey accent that she somehow slips completely out of while filming and then slips right back into when she’s done. He also introduces me to the actress who plays his mother. Her name is Josephine, and she’s gracious and charming, wisp-thin, and somehow imposing despite being no taller than five foot one.

I watch with interest as he films his two short scenes. In the first, he and Josephine (or Blake and Lucille, I guess) have an argument in the living room—something about controlling stock in Ratcliffe Enterprises. Apparently she still doesn’t know that he’s her son, and I wonder when that comes out. She’s literally standing on a box for this scene, and still has to crane her neck to look up at him.

Later, in some sort of carriage house set, Blake tries once again to get into Cassie’s pants, and she gives him a sound smack over it. They have some furious words—again with the freaking stock options, can’t they find something sexier to fight about?—and then go in for another clinch. This time, apparently, he’s destined to be successful; he topples back on some hay with her on top of him, she gives a breathy “The hell with it,” and pulls his shirt open.

Well, that’s enough of that, I think, and look at absolutely anything else.

Then someone yells “Cut!” and Mitch heads my way, bumps fists with the nearest cameraman and says, “And I’m out.”

“I love filming with this guy,” the cameraman says to no one in particular. “He just nails it every time.”

“That was … interesting,” I say, as Mitch reaches me. His shirt’s still wide open, and I very, very carefully do not check out everything there is to check out. “What happens with Blake and Cassie now?”

He lifts his eyebrows at me. “About what you’d expect.”

“And … how’s that to film?”

He laughs. “Not at all what you’d expect. Tuesday will probably be a long day, because we’ll spend some extra time blocking—but it’s one take, remember?”

“Even the love scenes?”

“Maybe especially the love scenes,” he says. “They’re a pain in the ass. The set has to be cleared—anyone not in the scene or literally holding a camera is gone—and they black out the monitors. I actually wouldn’t care at all, but Martina probably won’t be in any more than her underwear.”

Now it’s my turn to lift my eyebrows.

He shakes his head. “It sounds a lot more fun than it is,” he says. “I had no idea how hard this job would be when I took the part on DN.”

I feel really proud of him and, hard on the heels of that, remember he’s not mine to feel proud of. He gestures that I should precede him off set, so I do—right back out to the front lobby, even though he’s still in full makeup.

“Don’t you want to wash up?” I ask.

“Yeah, but I share a dressing room with two other guys,” he says, “and they’re both working today. Odds are about even whether they’d even have clothes on if I took you back there.”

“You don’t get your own dressing room?”

“Space, you might have noticed, is at a premium,” he says. “The only person here with her own dressing room is Josephine, and she’s been on the show twenty years.”

“I hope I’m at my job in twenty years,” I say.

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

I shrug. “I told you, I’ve been screwing up a lot lately.”

“You know,” he says, and pauses for a long moment before he continues. “You might want to think about who benefits if it looks like you can’t handle your job.”

I laugh a little. “If I lost my job—which, perish the thought—they’d offer it to Aiyana.”

“Okay?” he says.

“She’d turn it down,” I say. “I’m not worried about her.”

He shrugs. “You know your people better than I do, obviously. I’m gonna go change back into my own clothes, then if you don’t mind we can head to my place so I can clean up?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Cool. Then we’ll try to get to Jacks before happy hour, or we’ll never get a pool table.”

* * *

His apartment is on Columbus Ave, only a few blocks from the studio, and it’s just what I’d have expected if I’d stopped to think about it. It’s small, the furniture looks lived-on and comfortable, and it smells fantastic. A huge arched window lets in the waning sunlight, making the whole place cheerful. “This is sweet,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says. “Grab a seat and I’ll go wash up.”

He heads through the only other door in the room and shuts it behind him. Bedroom, I presume, and tell my brain to just cut it out when it tries to linger over that. I’m not in it, nor am I going to be in it.

I hear water running, and take the opportunity to try out the couch, which is lumpy and comfortable all at once. There’s a photo album on the coffee table, and I reach over and peek under the cover. The first picture is an 8 by 10 glossy photograph of Mitch. In it, he’s wearing a tan suede coat, looking back over his shoulder and laughing at whoever’s holding the camera.

I take the album in my lap and turn the pages one by one. They’re all photos of Mitch, and to say he photographs well would be the understatement of the century. All the pictures are different—some black and white, some close-ups, some that seem to be candid, some posed. I linger over one of him straddling a chair in his cowboy boots and a gorgeous sweater the color of his eyes, thinking about every mistake I made on the road to this moment.

The last picture, though, is odd—different from everything else. I stare at it for a moment, trying to figure out why Mitch has a picture of some other guy in here. Then it slowly dawns on me that what I’m looking at is Mitch’s eyes in a completely different face.

No, it’s Mitch’s face, too, if you know where to look—his jaw is unmistakable, and there’s also something about the lower lip that gives it away.

But that’s where the Mitch I know ends and some other guy begins. This guy is clean-shaven, with short spiky hair and the kind of serious, hollow-cheeked pout you’d expect from an underwear model. Not that he’s in underwear. He’s wearing jeans, his thumb hooked in the waistband like he’s just getting ready to give you a glimpse of what he’s got in there, and a gray tank, pulled up in this really douchey way to show off his abs.

This isn’t Mitch—and yet it is, without a doubt, him.

This is a guy nobody would call Mr. Wrong. But he’s all wrong.

“That’s a really old one,” Mitch says from the doorway of his room. I jump a little and turn around, then wish I didn’t. He’s damp and shirtless—whatever else has changed, the abs are still model-worthy—and I’m not equipped to deal with either of those things right now.

Just friends, just friends, just friends.

When I told Ryan the plan for today—studio tour and pool date with my very good friend Mitch—he literally laughed at me. Good luck with that, he said.

I was indignant at the time, but he was so right. This is really hard.

Mitch moves across the room and sits down beside me, pulling the photo album so that it’s half on his lap and half on mine. The hair framing his face is wet, and he smells clean and masculine, a very specific smell that is only him—and so good.

“It barely looks like you,” I say.

“Yeah, I was young.” He cocks his head as he looks at it. “Fresh off the bus in L.A. with a duffel bag and a manila envelope full of these, and just wanting to break into the business any way I could. I’ve never really liked it, though. It doesn’t look like me.”

“It is very different,” I say.

“Do you like it?” he asks, looking at me intently.

I think about it for a moment before answering. “I don’t dislike it.”

“But?”

“I don’t know; you’re right, it doesn’t look like you.” I look back and forth between the picture of the man and the man himself a couple more times, then shake my head. How can one man look so different? “It’s a very knock-’em-dead hot kind of picture, isn’t it?”

“I think that was probably the intention,” he says, nodding. “But I’m not really the knock-’em-dead type.”

Oh, I beg to differ.

“Why don’t you still look like this?” I ask, tapping the photo with my fingernail.

He shrugs. “Because that wasn’t me.” He flips back to the beginning, to the first picture of him in the suede jacket. “This is me—looser, more fun. Having a good time. This is the one I passed out at Fan Club Weekend. That other one, I look like every other guy in L.A. out on a casting call.”

“You might have gotten more work, though.”

He shrugs again. “I might have. But would it have been work I wanted? Eventually I figured out that getting jobs isn’t worth being something I’m not.”

“You could be a movie star, looking like that.”

“Or I could do what I do now, and be me.”

I know I’m staring at him but I can’t seem to stop myself. He’s so absolutely unlike anyone I’ve ever known, and in this moment I think he may be the most amazing, together, sensible person on earth. It’s the most inspiring kind of honor—being completely true to himself the way he is.

It might be the sexiest thing about him.

No, I still gotta go with the voice on that one.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

I say the first thing that pops into my head. “I was wondering how these photographers keep managing to find clothes the color of your eyes.”

“Are they?” he asks, and flips through a few pages. “I guess they kind of are. Interesting.”

“You know, for someone who wants to make a living being an actor, you’re remarkably unaware of how you look.”

“Acting isn’t about looks,” he says, “and I do make a living.” He stands. “I’m going to go find a shirt.”

Good idea. Very good idea.

And while he’s finding something to wear, I sit on his comfortable couch surrounded by the smell of him and wonder what it would be like to not care one bit what anyone else thinks.

I think it sounds rather nice.