More Than Words

Nina nodded. It wasn’t a snap decision, what you would share with the world and what you wouldn’t, how you wanted people to see you.

52

By eleven they had two working drafts. Nothing perfect, but getting there. And Nina had gotten used to sitting next to him, could ignore the heat they seemed to create.

“Are you hungry?” Rafael asked after they’d hammered out a paragraph about bilingual education and the benefits it would give to all New York City students.

Nina realized she was ravenous. She nodded. “Want to order something in?” she asked.

“How about a quick burger next door?” Rafael countered. “The kitchen’s open for another hour.”

Nina rolled her neck. “I’m afraid if we leave, we might not make it back,” she said.

Rafael ran his hand through the hair above his ear. His tell.

“What?” Nina asked.

Rafael smiled. “You always know,” he said. Then: “I was going to suggest that maybe you could come back tomorrow night.”

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?”

Nina took Rafael’s hand and slid off the stool. She felt the calluses on the tips of his fingers. As the photographer kept snapping pictures, the two of them ran into the kitchen. Their waiter hurried after them saying, “Sir! Ma’am!”

Rafael settled up the bill, paying in cash, and then said, “Just so you know, I won’t be coming back here. I don’t appreciate this sort of thing.”

The waiter looked at the floor, which made Nina suspect maybe he was in on it. But she didn’t want to make this any worse.

Rafael kept going. “I’m assuming we can get out the back entrance into the alley?”

The waiter nodded. “Yessir.”

“Great,” Rafael said. “That’s where we’re going. Where does it let us out?”

“Tenth and Fiftieth,” one of the line cooks answered from behind Nina. “Espero que ganas, vato.”

“Gracias,” Rafael said, walking over to shake the man’s hand.

Nina followed. “Cual puerta debemos usar?” she asked him, wondering which door he’d tell them to use.

He looked surprised that she spoke in Spanish but replied her question, pointing to the door next to the freezer. “Ese,” he said.

“Gracias,” she responded.

“Come on,” Rafael said, handing Nina her jacket.

The two of them walked out the door into the alley behind the restaurant, and then Rafael started jogging. Nina had no trouble keeping up with him, and they ran down the darkened city streets until they reached the Hudson River Greenway, overlooking the river. They sat on a bench that was illuminated by a streetlight, its glow making a halo around them in the crisp autumn night. They were both slightly out of breath.

“Well,” Rafael said. “That was a nice escape.”

“I can’t believe we did that,” Nina said. “Now the story’s going to be even crazier than if we’d just sat there. Mac and Jane are going to kill us.”

“Candidate and Former Speechwriter Hide from Press in Kitchen?” Rafael asked.

Nina smiled at the fact that he was playing her father’s headline game. But then she got serious again. “Maybe . . . Joseph Gregory’s Daughter Enjoys Night Out Three Weeks after Father’s Death.”

Rafael touched the gray silk blouse that was skimming Nina’s forearm but moved his hand away before she could feel the warmth of his fingers on her skin. The hair on her arms stood at attention.

“They won’t say that,” he said. “Maybe Mayoral Candidate Romances Former Staffer.”

Nina looked at him, her heart beating faster. “Are you romancing me?” she asked.

“What do you think, Palabrecita?” he said, actually squeezing her forearm this time, perhaps emboldened by the fact that she hadn’t moved it away when he brushed his fingers across her shirt.