Musician Johnny and his girlfriend Jessica are a young couple who constantly have sex. Meanwhile, Dr. Wendell Simpson is a surgeon who never has sex with his wife. His wife, Carol, discovers that Simpson regularly visits a Prostitute and is troubled by what she finds.
While riding around on his motorcycle, Johnny falls and hits his head on a stone plate, a fall that leads to a coma brought on by a subdural hematoma. Carol demands a divorce when Simpson is summoned to the hospital to perform emergency brain surgery on Johnny; during the operation, Simpson’s mind wanders, and Johnny dies on the operating table. Leaving the hospital, Simpson is chased by the grief-stricken Jessica, who swears revenge on Johnny’s killer.
Jessica begins sending threatening notes and making harassing calls to Simpson. At a golf club, Simpson and Carol try to patch up their marriage and resume their intimate life, but the moment the telephone rings interrupts them. Carol gets dressed and walks out, leaving him behind. The phone rings again, and Jessica’s voice taunts him with the question, “Why did you let him die?” Jessica becomes more deranged by watching home videos of Johnny for hours. The next day, she pulls a gun on Simpson, forcing him to drive to her house, where she chloroforms him and ties him up. Simpson wakes to find an Alsatian dog barking nearby, tied inches from him. Outside, Jessica smashes his car with an axe, declaring she intends to kill him, but only when she is ready.
Jessica forces Simpson to eat dog food and to lick her bare abdomen smeared with his own blood from a wound she inflicts on him. He finds himself strangely attracted to her. She drags him to the beach outside the house on a leash and announces her plan to drown him, nearly carrying it out until she revives him. Jessica begins recalling some of Johnny’s cruelties and excesses: a baby she was carrying from their affair miscarried at an early stage, and her beloved dog dies, which she buries on the beach. A melancholic Jessica engages in further sexual games with Simpson and recalls something that changes her mind about Johnny.
Months earlier, during a Venice vacation, Johnny bought Jessica a bracelet to symbolize their love. They go to a movie theater with Johnny’s friend Nicky and share a kiss, but Jessica discovers that Johnny was simultaneously letting Nicky perform oral sex on him. The memory of this ménage is the last straw for Jessica. Seeing the self-destructive person Johnny was, she walks to the ocean and throws the bracelet into the water. Jessica returns to the house, unties Simpson, and tells him he is free to go. She goes to her bedroom, disrobes, and lies on the bed, placing a pistol to her head to kill herself. Simpson enters and stops her from suicide by having sex with her. They lie side by side in bed as Simpson recites a poem:
> When you have spent your life like a fortune that never seemed to end. A second chance will come like a long lost friend. Great joy will fill you and flush you hot. No more will you ever be cool for she is the Devil's honey pot. And you'll drown in her you fool.
