Abbott Elementary meets Ali Hazelwood in this spicy rivals-to-lovers rom-com starring two kindergarten teachers whose one night stand leads to an unexpected nine-month lesson in love.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sidney Halston’s Love Lessons, which is out August 6th 2024.
Quirky, free-spirited Valerie Marquez likes to make sure her kindergarten class has fun while learning. Uptight, by-the-book Andrew Wexler is allergic to fun, and loud music gives him a migraine, which makes sharing a wall with the other kindergarten teacher who loves to blast music all day his worst nightmare.
But during the end-of the school year party, their shared tension morphs into a night of wild sex. What neither expected was the surprise consequence of that night.
A baby.
And, if sharing a wall with her nemesis was hard, sharing a classroom with him, while she’s feeling hormonal and hungry, is much harder. Turns out that co-teaching isn’t the hardest thing they’ll have to overcome. Trying not to fall in love with her baby daddy is much harder.
Once the morning announcements were over, and the kids were all seated and focused—or as focused as a bunch of kindergarteners could be—Valerie walked to the cabinet where they kept the school supplies. For some reason, there was an overwhelming smell of Play-Doh. She’d never thought of the smell of Play-Doh as pleasant or unpleasant. It was just . .. Play-Doh, but now the scent was stuck in her nostrils. As she began to take out the clear containers of crayons, she felt the black coffee that she’d sipped moments earlier start to burn back up her esophagus.
She clutched her chest. Heartburn. The very bad kind. The nauseating kind.
She put the Tupperware container with the Play-Doh back on the shelf and held on to the sides of the cabinet, head hanging down.
Andrew came up beside her. “Okay, okay. I get it, you need coffee with lots of sugar. No need for the dramatics. Here, I added four packets of white sugar,” he said, handing her the mug again.
The smell of the coffee, the overwhelming yet familiar smell of Play-Doh, and the waxy scent of crayons all swirled together.
She gently pushed the mug away.
“Get that away from me, please.” She didn’t mean to sound so nasty, but she needed all these pungent smells removed immediately.
“A little dramatic, don’t you think? Make your own damn coffee next time.”
But he didn’t get it away from her quick enough, and, unable to control her gag reflex, the coffee shot up from her stomach together with the little she’d eaten and drunk in the past twentyfour hours all over Andrew Wexler’s very expensive and very clean beige Cole Haan loafers.
The class started to yell, “Gross!” and “Ewww.” Andrew placed the mug on a shelf and called the school nurse for help. Two kids, Remy and Amber, threw up from seeing Valerie throw up, and some of the class dry heaved.
This just worsened the nausea she felt, and she ran straight out of the room and into the bathroom, where she expelled a lot of nothing from her system.
Maybe somewhere inside her soul she should have been mortified about having thrown up on Wexler in front of the class, but the thought of not dying was all that was on her mind at the moment.
“Val . . . Val . . . are you okay?” It was Monique. “Andrew and Nurse Angie asked me to come check on you. She’s knee-deep in vomit and gagging and couldn’t come herself.”
“Oh God.” Valerie groaned into the toilet bowl. When she finished, she wiped her mouth with toilet paper, flushed the toilet, and left the stall. She splashed her face with water and rinsed her mouth out. “I feel better.” But she definitely didn’t look better. Her eyes were bloodshot, her nose was red and runny, and her skin was splotchy.
“Well, that’s more than I can say for your class. Angie wants to know if you all ate something? Did you bring them any food from home? She’s trying to rule out food poisoning.”
“No. They saw me throw up and then they started to gag. I don’t think they’re sick. I’m sick, but they’re not sick—they have secondhand vomiting.” It was a thing, she was sure of it.
How would she face Andrew? She had vomited on him! Now that she was feeling somewhat human again, the mortification reared its ugly head.
“I think I did get that virus, after all,” she said, placing her palms on her cheeks. No fever.
Just that gross nauseous sensation.
“Yeah, probably. I have three other kids out today, and I heard there’re a few absent teachers too.”
“I’m okay now. Let me go help Wexler and Angie. Poor Wexler and his shoes.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” Monique said as they parted ways in the hall.
With a loud exhale, she pulled the classroom door open. She expected full-on chaos. A scene from The Exorcist, with vomit splattered all over the walls. Instead, all the children were in their seats. There were a few with red eyes and tears on their faces, but the rest were entertaining themselves with Legos.
“Hey, are you okay?” Andrew asked when he saw her walk into the classroom. She noticed two empty seats.
“Remy and Amber went with the nurse to call their parents. I think they’re fine,” he said, and she realized the custodian, sweet Patrick, was already cleaning up the mess with that weird powder they spread on the floor that smelled like fake pine, which was much better than the alternative smell.
“I’m so sorry, Patrick,” she said. “Let me help.”
“Don’t you worry, Val. Look, it’s like it never happened,” he said as he wiped the floor.
“That’s was dicusting, Miss Valewie,” Henry said, and the other children agreed.
“I know. I’m so sorry, kiddos. I don’t know what happened. Is everyone okay?” Then she turned to Andrew. “I’m mortified. I’m sorry about your shoes. I’ll buy you new ones or wash them or . . .” She looked down and realized he was wearing sneakers.
“Relax, it’s fine. I had my gym bag in the car.”
She scrunched up her nose and whispered “sorry” one more time.
“Yesterday, tears. Today, vomit. What’s it going to be tomorrow? You’re full of surprises, Marquez.”
“It must be my hormones. I’m about to get my period, is all.” As she said those words, she got a sickening feeling. Her period—of course. No wonder she’d been feeling ill. Her periods had always been erratic, and it wasn’t unusual for her to have spotting one or even two months and a full-on tsunami the next. This month must be tsunami season.
“Too much information, Marquez.”
“We’re room buddies, Wexler. It’s inevitable that you’ll know when I’m hormonal.”
He shrugged and then began to reorganize the class, and she started to help, but he ushered her to her chair. “Let me. I don’t want any more emergencies today.”
She didn’t argue and sat. Was she hormonal? Was it time for her period? She had some spotting in Haiti and then again the first week back in Miami. But she didn’t get cramps or get cranky even when her flow was heavy. She definitely didn’t throw up on people. It must be the virus.
Unless . . .
Oh. My. God.
It suddenly hit her like a ton of bricks, and she stood up, her chair rolling back and hitting the wall from the momentum.
“That’s the opposite of you sitting, Marquez.”
She ran to the hook by the door where she hung her purse and took out her cell phone and looked at the calendar. It had been over a month since she’d been back in Miami. Like a zombie, she plopped down on a chair, unaware of what was happening around her. Andrew and the class were staring at her.
“What now, Marquez?”
She looked down and around. She was sitting on a student’s chair. She looked like a giant. She googled: Can someone have spotting if pregnant?
The answer was yes. In fact, it seemed some women even had their period while they were pregnant.
Then she googled: Can pregnancy make you insane? Because that’s how she felt, but she didn’t wait for the answer, because Andrew bent down and whispered into her ear, “I’m amazed your kids even learned the alphabet. You’re a disaster. Are you on drugs?”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question considering how she’d been acting.
She stood abruptly and grabbed her purse. “Ummmm . . . can you take over the rest of the day? I have to go.”
Before he had a chance to agree, she ran out of the classroom and out of the school and straight to the nearest pharmacy.
From the book LOVE LESSONS by Sidney Halston. Copyright © 2024 by Sidney Halston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
