Imani gasped. “Don’t you dare make me come o like the weirdo here. As if it’s totally normal that you’ve allegedly been in a relationship with this woman for what? Six months? And I’ve never heard of her. Neither have any of your other friends.”
Biting her tongue, Reagan wiggled her eyebrows instead of breaking her contractually mandated silence. She trusted Imani with her life, but she’d learned long ago that more than one person couldn’t really keep a secret. Three was just begging for trouble.
“Are you really not going to tell me what the hell is going on?” Imani’s narrowed eyes made it clear she wasn’t going to let it go. If Reagan were in her shoes, she wouldn’t let it go so easily either. “Are you trying to have some While You Were Sleeping thing here? I thought you’d shed your bad romantic movie obsession years ago.”
“First, I don’t know what you think that movie is about.
Second, shouldn’t you be studying for the last part of your
CPA exam?” Reagan countered, hoping to shove her o topic.
Imani lifted a sculpted brow. She refused to be guided away from the subject. “Don’t you worry about my accounting career. What the hell do you have up your sleeve?
You’re not usually so . . . sketchy.”
“I’m in love,” Reagan replied, batting her eyelashes.
For a moment, Imani didn’t react. She just stared, unblinkingly, until a high-pitched laugh tore from her body and bounced against the high ceiling and its exposed metal ductwork before echoing through the studio.
While Reagan waited for her dramatic display to come to an end, she pushed o the table and strode across the room to make sure her students’ work was well arranged on the drying room shelves.
Moments later, Imani stopped cackling and leaned against the open door to the drying room. The closed-in space the size of a large bedroom had metal shelves on every wall and a row of high shelving units at the center.
“Reagan be serious. What the hell is going on?” Imani demanded, her tone increasingly sharp.
As Reagan covered some of the older pieces that had finished drying in plastic, she sighed. Lying wasn’t comfortable, but she couldn’t risk making Libby’s situation worse by blabbing about their arrangement.
“Listen, I know it’s a bit sudden, okay,” she admitted as she exited the room with a board full of mugs ready to be fired in the kiln. “But I just want you to give her a chance,”
she said, sticking to the only truth she could whittle away from the farce. “Libby’s a really great woman and I think you’re going to like her.”
“Why keep her a secret if she’s so great?”
A fair question, one Reagan couldn’t answer. “She’s not out.”
The confession softened the lines on Imani’s forehead.
“Well, that’s the other part I was going to ask you about.
Kimber sent me some links. She’s some dating guru for straight people, and until five minutes ago she was engaged to some dude. Was she cheating on him?”
“No,” Reagan replied before she could get any further.
“They ended things a year ago,” she explained as an alarm went o , alerting her that one of the kilns was ready to be opened.
Following her to the row of large industrial kilns, Imani was still full of questions. Reagan wished she would just accept her answers at face value, but until Imani was satisfied she wasn’t going to stop. She was protective, if not unrelenting.
“And you’ve been having a secret thing with her all this time? Why wouldn’t you tell me? You didn’t trust me not to spill her secret? I didn’t even know who the hell she was. It’s not like she’s looking to set up any non-heteros for love.”
Reagan let the question sit with her a moment as she began unfastening the multiple locks on the kiln. “She just took over her family business. I’m sure diversification is high on her list of innovations.”
While Imani mulled over her response, Reagan pulled out a set of finished mugs from a class earlier in the week.
“Damn it,” she cursed, finding one of the mugs in four pieces and another with an unattached handle.
As she set the broken pieces on a table and grabbed some glue, Imani watched her. Using a magnifying glass at the end of a flexible arm clipped to the end of the table, Reagan started with the easier task of gluing the handle back on the body of the mug.
“I’m thinking about doing that fundraiser,” Reagan said when Imani stayed quiet. “It’s going to take me forever to raise enough money otherwise.”