"Lust" focuses primarily on the difficulty young people in modern society have in forming meaningful relationships. The protagonist in "Lust" is an unnamed upper-class teenage girl away at boarding school who engages in a series of brief and unsatisfying relationships.

Each time she begins a relationship, the protagonist hopes and believes that the initial physical engagement will lead to a greater emotional connection. At first, encounters with the opposite sex are pleasant.

She says, "their eyes [are] at a low burn and their hands no matter what starting off shy and with such a gentle touch." Yet, inevitably, these initially appealing encounters wither into a meaningless physicality. Each man with whom she engages leaves the protagonist feeling empty and unfulfilled.

Thus, after spending an entire day in bed with one man, she then went out to the local store and "got butterscotch sauce, craving something sweet...