Excerpt from Matrimony by Joshua Henkin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I want to kiss you." She rested her hands next to her plate. Her forearms were tawny, bare, and slender, but also with a firmness to them, a heft of sinew. A single white candle sat between them, the wax dripping to the table.

"Do you always kiss your dates?"

"If I want to," she said. "If they want to kiss me back."

He told her he wanted to kiss her back. He leaned across the table and so did she, their bodies hovering above their pasta bowls and the tiny saucer of olive oil with red pepper flakes swimming in it.

"You're a very handsome man."

He laughed.

"Why? No one's ever called you handsome before?"

"No one's ever called me a man." Her fingers were touching his, lightly, lightly, and his fingers were touching hers back.

*****

At the dorms, Julian asked his roommate to vacate for the night. "I need privacy," he said.

"But I live here."

"Technically."

"Not technically. In fact."

"Then think of it as one of my peremptories." It was like jury duty, Julian explained. The lawyers could dismiss a certain number of jurors without giving any reason.

Was it possible for a person to exist without sleep? According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the longest anyone had gone without sleep was twenty-one days. Laboratory mice died when deprived of sleep, yet when an autopsy was performed the cause of death could not be determined. Apparently the mice had died from lack of sleep, but you couldn't see it clinically.

Their first week together, Julian and Mia stopped sleeping. They were coasting on adrenaline, Mia said.

"On libido," said Julian.

Banished from his room that first night, Julian's roommate hadn't come back the second or the third. Mia felt bad for Julian's roommate, but not so bad, she told Julian, as to want him to return. She and Julian were alone, and they made love where they wanted to, in Julian's bedroom, in the common room; they even made love on Julian's roommate's beanbag chair. To be nineteen and making love wherever you wished: this, Julian thought, was how a person should live. Mia was sprawled naked next to him, peaceful, recumbent on the beanbag chair, her eyes half closed, her hair touching his; the vinyl felt cool along his neck. The dorm was quiet, and above them he could hear a fly buzzing against a bare lightbulb. There was a candle on the shelf, and he got up and lit it. He lay next to Mia in the hollow imprint his body had left. She started to drift off.

"You can't fall sleep," he said. "It's against the rules."

"I'm cold," she murmured. She took a blanket and spread it over them. She turned on the TV, where a kung fu movie was playing, and they watched it idly for a few minutes, then muted the sound and read to each other from books they chose randomly off the bookshelves. Julian read to Mia from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Mia read to Julian from Freud's Totem and Taboo and from Thirteen Days by Robert Kennedy. They even took turns reading about photosynthesis and the Krebs cycle from Julian's roommate's biology textbook.

Mia kissed Julian. She kissed his toes, his knees, his elbows. She kissed the tiny tuft of hair above his butt. It was four-thirty in the morning and they hadn't slept the night before. You got to the point when you were so tired you couldn't make a decision. You couldn't stay awake and you couldn't go to sleep. Before long, you were starting to hallucinate.

Finally they fell asleep, and when they awoke the next morning Julian said, "Thomas Jefferson was in my dream last night. He was my student. I was Thomas Jefferson's professor."

Mia looked at him dubiously.

"Jefferson came in to complain about his grade. I'd given him a B-plus on the Declaration of Independence."

Excerpted from Matrimony by Joshua Henkin. Copyright © 2007 by Joshua Henkin.