David Dunlop is fifty-five years of age. He has left his wife of twenty-nine years and now sits before a dying fire in the dismal flat he has leased as a love nest to share with a young woman from the office. Why did he leave his wife? There was no valid reason. He had merely felt that his sex life had lost its energy, its fire, and the thrill which had been there with all those women in his younger days. He sits alone. His girlfriend is away for the week-end. But he has tired of her anyway. The novelty is gone, and so, he has realised, is much of the energy he once had.

He sits alone and broods, and thinks back over his life, thinks back to the time when he was young and single. He remembers the girls and the women who had come into his life, remembers how they had touched upon his life, how they had stirred the fire in his chest. He relives the joys and the heartaches he had experienced as love and sex had become interwoven while he grew from the boy to the man. He walks once more with Annie in Sherbrooke Forest, back when he was twelve and she was eleven, and remembers how he had held her hand and was so deeply in love for the very first time. And then there was Wendy, his steady girlfriend during his last year at school and he recalls the pangs he had suffered as he longed to be more intimate. Carol had come next, and had taught him that all he needed was confidence. And then Gina had entered into his life and the world became beautiful and alive and he had never been more fulfilled. But Gina had also brought misery to him, more misery than he thought one person could bear.

There were others who followed after Gina. There was chubby Cynthia, and sex with no strings attached. He went with Grace and she thought he would marry her, but Grace would have to think again. His mother had liked Grace. He left Melbourne for Adelaide to take himself away from the heartache which Gina had caused him. Paula was next. Dave had never had sex with a married woman before. Paula was the aggressor.

Paula only wanted sex, and would take as much as he could give, but then she decided that she wanted love as well and he was lucky to escape. And lastly, there was Jenny, the girl he married, the girl he had spent the rest of his life with, twenty-nine years, until he decided that he wanted what his life had been before marriage. Too late he realises that Jenny is the only woman he ever truly wanted. But Jenny is lost to him now, she has another man in her life, and David Dunlop feels once more the pain and the misery and the utter loneliness which sex and love had brought to his life.