A 22-year-old woman meets a 27-year-old man at a poetry reading in New York. After two months of dating, the two go on a weekend retreat to a cabin in Vermont. The woman is more in love with her idea of the man than the man himself. She thinks he's a bad writer and a weak critic. When they get to the cabin, a man named Jeff who works for the property's owners greets them and comments on the woman being Asian and her bleached hair. The couple has sex in the cabin. She wants him to intuit her desires and is upset that he won't instinctually dominate her in the ways she wants. He wants her to describe her desires to him, to generally be vulnerable and open with her emotions and words. They have sex on a similar page to one another, but with a disconnect. After, she reflects on a boyfriend who broke up with her saying, "It seems to me that you are less interested in actually being vulnerable with others and more enamored with the symptoms of your own vulnerability." They have more sex. They go on a hike and he mocks her for taking a picture of the landscape, asking if she wants a selfie. After the hike, when she gets out of the shower, he and the car are gone. She feels trapped, as if, without him and the car, she has no way to escape. She asks Jeff if he's seen her boyfriend. He says he shouldn't have left her and tries to persuade her to have dinner with him that night and go fishing with him the next day if he doesn't return. He describes in detail how to gut a fish, gendering the fish as female. She excuses herself and throws up in the cabin bathroom. When her boyfriend finally returns, she is angry at him. He'd gone to get things for dinner. They have more sex, with her tied up, and this time she starts to cry. He realizes this is the emotional vulnerability he'd wanted, but he doesn't know if he can be emotionally vulnerable back. Driving home, she feels she is no longer suffering under the weight of articulable feeling. They are tender with one another. She doesn't know that he will leave her soon.