The moment 19-year-old Simone Paris walks into Otto Guest's art class, she knows that she must have him. Old enough to be her father, Otto is everything her ascetic, willfully out-of-touch parents are not: worldly, sensual, gregarious, at ease with modernism, a risk-taker. In short, an artist. She sets out to seduce him - and succeeds. He will be her mentor, her lever into the larger world beyond the sedate boundaries of home. When he invites her to travel in Mexico with him, she readily agrees.

Soon she finds herself in an unfamiliar world of heat and grit, immersed in an intensely erotic relationship, thirsty for all that Otto can teach her, yet struggling to maintain her claim on his emotional life.

As they stalk, dodge, and confront one another within the confines of a tiny Mexican village - one reaching toward the future, the other grappling with the past - Otto begins to teach Simone lessons she never wanted to learn: that love is not the force that drives every affair, and that knowing theories about art is not the same as understanding how to live.