More Than Words(53)

She’d canceled on the book club Priscilla had tried to convince her to rejoin, so there was nothing in her calendar. Probably Tim would want to have dinner, but maybe they could eat early and she could help Rafael after.

“Sure,” Nina said.

She sent Rafael the drafts and powered down her computer, and then they headed to the bar next door. She’d been there with Jane and Jorge over the past few months. Sometimes with her interns, whom she still felt badly about leaving without any real notice.

“How are Jasmine and Rob?” Nina asked Rafael as they sat down.

“Getting along well with Danny,” he answered. “So that’s good. I think they liked you better, too, though.”

Nina smiled, then studiously hid behind the menu. When the waiter came, they ordered burgers and fries and a couple of beers. But those beers somehow turned into half a yard of beer for each of them. A gift from the owner, the waiter said when he dropped them off.

“Wow,” Nina said, looking at the length of the cup.

“It’s dramatic,” Rafael said, waving his thanks over to the owner. “That guy always tells me to bring my next girlfriend here for a pint. I think he’s hoping I’ll post pictures or something. Free advertising for his bar.”

“Mayoral Candidate Rafael O’Connor-Ruiz Enjoys Beer at Local Haunt,” Nina said, before she realized what she was doing.

“You writing Page Six headlines now?” he asked.

Nina blushed. “My father and I always did that,” she said. “It’s so dorky.”

“It’s not,” Rafael replied, taking a swig of the beer. “It’s kind of adorable.”

Nina followed with a sip of her own. “Adorkable?” she asked.

Rafael laughed. “So you do that in English, too,” he said. “Were the headlines a game?”

“Yeah, but I think it was actually his way of getting me to think about consequences,” Nina told Rafael, running her fingers along the base of the glass. “He’d ask me what the best and worst headlines were that someone could come up with. He wanted me to think about the worst spin a reporter could put on a situation.”

“Wow,” Rafael said.

“I know.” Nina took another sip of beer. “Sometimes being his daughter was a little intense. I’m realizing it more and more these days.”

Nina had the urge to tell Rafael about the house in the Hudson Valley, what she’d learned while she was there, how talking to employees at the Gregory Corporation had unearthed surprises, and how it all had changed her opinion of her father. But she didn’t say anything. Even though she had a feeling Rafael would understand. Talking about all of these raw emotions made her feel vulnerable. And she didn’t want to go there. Not when she was trying so hard not to watch Rafael’s lips as they touched the rim of his glass.

“I think a lot of fathers are a little intense,” he said after he swallowed. “I know mine was.”

“How so?” Nina asked, wondering if Rafael’s father monitored his behavior in the same way hers did.

But their burgers arrived just then, and Rafael didn’t answer. So Nina opened up the ketchup, trying to get some onto her plate. It was stuck in the bottle.

“May I?” Rafael asked.

Nina handed the ketchup bottle over, and Rafael recapped it, shaking it three times. Then he uncapped it and gave it to Nina. “Try it now,” he said.

Nina turned the bottle upside down and the ketchup flowed smoothly onto her plate.

“It’s a non-Newtonian fluid,” Rafael said.

Nina looked at him. “Is this a Bronx Science thing?” she asked.

He laughed. “Actually, I did learn it in high school physics. Non-Newtonian fluids sometimes act like solids and sometimes act like liquids, depending on how much force is exerted on them. When you shake up ketchup, you exert enough force that the spherical particles turn into ellipses and basically become a thousand times thinner than they were pre-shaking.”

Nina blinked at him for a moment.

“I guess it was my turn to be dorky,” he said, looking a little embarrassed.

“Dorky people are my favorite kind,” Nina answered, realizing too late that she probably shouldn’t have said that.

Rafael didn’t look embarrassed anymore. “Mine, too,” he said, looking at her as if she were a book in another language he needed to translate.

Nina handed the bottle of ketchup back to him, so he could pour some onto his plate.

And then a camera flash went off.

Nina and Rafael both looked toward the bar, where the flash went off again.

“Rafael! Nina!” the photographer said, trying to catch their attention. But Rafael and Nina had looked back at each other.

“Madre de Dios,” Rafael muttered under his breath. “This guy has been popping up everywhere. He took my picture as I was walking out of the gym last week.”

Nina thought about what the owner had said to Rafael, urging him to bring a girlfriend. And then she thought about how long it takes to drink a free half yard of beer. “You were set up,” Nina said. “The bartender. The beer. That guy’s paying him off to get photos of you.”

Rafael looked at the photographer and then at the man behind the bar. “I have an idea,” he said, grabbing their jackets from the hook behind him and getting off the bar stool. He reached out his hand. “Come with me?”