Cambridge, Massachusetts 1979 ... In the middle of an autumn night in 1979, Jennifer Springer arrives at the ER in Cambridge, MA, with a bleeding hand from a game in which the winner is the one with the wound. Leaving the hospital, David Sloan finds her Harvard Health Services card in his pocket. For David, their midnight encounter begins a relationship in which intense pleasure coexists with desperate longing and uncertainty. Jennifer is beautiful, uninhibited, and sexually adventurous, but she insists on setting the terms of their relationship and remaining free to pursue other men and women. Never knowing when Jennifer will call, David finds the satisfactions of his work as a science writer for a Harvard magazine dwindling, and as his obsession with Jennifer grows, the pleasures of ordinary friendships and other relationships drain away from his life. In the end, David must decide whether to continue playing the game into which Jennifer has drawn him, or to flinch and lose the game, but regain his life.