Introduction

"Riveting, chilling, and page-turning. Be prepared to stay up all night." -- New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline

For fans of dark and twisty psychological thrillers, Watch Me is a riveting novel of suspense about how far obsession can go.

Kate Youngblood is disappearing. Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor at Blackwood college, she’s dangerously close to never being noticed again. The follow-up novel to her successful debut tanked. Her husband left her for a woman ten years younger. She’s always been bright, beautiful, independent and a little wild, but now her glow is starting to vanish. She’s heading into an age where her eyes are less blue, her charm worn out, and soon no one will ever truly look at her, want to know her, again.

Except one.

Sam Grist is Kate’s most promising student. An unflinching writer with razor-sharp clarity who gravitates towards dark themes and twisted plots, his raw talent is something Kate wants to nurture into literary success. But he’s not there solely to be the best writer. He’s been watching her. Wanting her. Working his way to her for years.

As Sam slowly makes his way into Kate’s life, they enter a deadly web of dangerous lies and forbidden desire. But how far will his fixation go? And how far will she allow it?

A gripping novel exploring intense obsession and illicit attraction, Jody Gehrman introduces a world where what you desire most may be the most dangerous thing of all.

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Excerpt

SAM

After five years waiting for this moment, watching you for the first time still catches me off guard. I recognize you from your book jacket, but the reality of you—a three-dimensional object moving through space, flesh and blood and golden hair—makes my pulse race. You don’t know me—not yet—but nothing spikes my pulse. I am ice. I ooze cool, unruffled detachment. It’s the thing people find unnerving about me, the thing I try to hide. I know how to smile and raise my eyebrows and frown in all the right places, just to show I’m human, to communicate to the other hairless apes that I’m part of the tribe. If I don’t control my face, it defaults to blank detachment, and that gives people the creeps. Watching you, though, I don’t have to fake it. I can feel my lips stretching into an amazed smile of their own accord, the smile explorers must have worn when they first stumbled on the New World.

You’re walking across campus framed by two rows of flame-red maples. Your boots kick bright mounds of leaves strewn across your path. I can see from the slight bounce in your gait you’re enjoying the flurry of each step. Though you’re bundled against the cold, a bright green scarf wrapped around your throat, it takes no effort at all to imagine you in bed, the long sinewy lines of your body a feast of light and shadow as you stretch, catlike, back arching.

God, you’re perfect.

I’ve never allowed myself to consider what I’d do if you turned out to be ordinary. If I started school at Blackwood, the place I’ve worked and schemed to enter, only to discover you’re not the woman I thought you were. I didn’t allow myself to consider the possibility because I knew, deep down, it would kill me. By the time I’d read the first page of your book, you were in my blood, in my bones. To live without you was unthinkable.

Of course, you write fiction, and you’re private, so the number of facts I’ve managed to scrape together about your life could fit on a postcard. I love that about you—your mystery. In a world packed with blogs and Facebook updates and tweets and Instagrams, a world crowded with so much white noise from self-absorbed assholes who share every bowel movement in tedious detail, you are enigmatic. Like Shakespeare, it is much easier to find theory and speculation about your life than solid facts.

You are an onion I intend to peel, layer by layer. I will love every second of it. Your mystery will yield to me, your dark cocoon penetrated by my patient, steady hands.

Though I have little solid evidence about who you are and how you fill your hours, I still feel close to you. I watch your jaunty green scarf flutter in the breeze, your hair trailing behind you in a golden swirl. We are connected. It’s undeniable. And it’s not just the tie that binds a fan to his idol. Yes, it’s impossible to read a great writer’s work and not experience their essence. I don’t see you the way I see Nabokov, though, or the Brontës, or Melville. I see you for what you are: the only person on earth who will ever understand me.

You stop to examine a woodpecker. From my position on a nearby bench, I have a perfect view of your motionless body. Your throat is white and exposed as you tilt your face to study the industrious little fucker. He pecks harder than ever at the trunk of a tall, elegant birch, as if urged on by his audience. I see you smile.

Without trying, I smile, too.

Copyright © 2018 by Jody Gehrman view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Sam’s obsession with Kate begins from a distance; he found Kate’s book when he was seventeen and loved it, but he could learn little about her online. What do you see as the basis for his obsession? Was it arbitrary, or can the connection between writer and reader constitute a sufficient catalyst for a passionate fixation?

2. Do you see any similarities between Eva and Kate? Does there seem to be a common reason Sam was drawn to each of them?

3. Kate puts a lot of power in the idea of being seen by another person. What does it mean to her? How does this need make Kate vulnerable and how does it make her powerful?

4. How does Zoe’s pregnancy affect Kate’s state of mind at the beginning of the novel? How does Zoe’s transformation from expecting mother to new mom over the course of the book change Kate and Zoe’s dynamic?

5. Raul seems like a potential partner for Kate in many ways; he’s financially stable, age-appropriate, and attractive. Why does Kate fail to fall for him? In what ways does dating Raul affect Kate’s feelings for Sam?

6. Sam’s mother makes several appearances in the novel. How does she deepen or complicate your perception of Sam as a character?

7. What role does Jess play in the novel? What does she represent to Sam? Is this different from Kate’s perception of Jess?

8. Kate admires Sam’s writing but frequently finds it disturbing. Do you agree with the point made by Kate’s dean, Frances Larkin, when she says it’s “absurd” for Kate to take issue with violence in a student’s work when her own books are equally violent? As a reader, do you find some forms of violence more disturbing than others?

9. Does the ending of Watch Me romanticize or condone violence? Why or why not?

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