Kissing Through a Pane of Glass Read Online Free Page A

my life. She had walked, silently, on to the terrace, and was standing to my left. She was wearing a simple cotton dress with an Indian print design and leather sandals. She appeared tall, lithe; the sun, behind her, shone through her dress so that her figure was outlined in partial silhouette: a beautiful shape.
     
    I believe I gave an involuntary gasp, which Liana probably interpreted as surprise. She turned her head a little towards me to look across to the mountains, and I set my eyes upon the profile that would haunt me all of my days. She was possessed of a beauty unlike anything I had ever encountered before. She oozed sexuality from every pore.
     
    The feelings, emotions and passions that pulsed through me in that moment had a character, a taste, a shape that was unique, other-worldly, ecstatic. Even in that desert heat, with the sweat running down my back in rivulets, shivers ran through my body. This was not a normal reaction, not a sensible, considered response. It was not natural.
     
    For a moment I was all but over-whelmed; fear took hold of me, gripped me around the throat like an iron hand, a vice. I did not know its nature, or why I should suddenly feel so scared, but it was as real a feeling as anything I had ever experienced. The beads of sweat that now broke out across my forehead were cold, clammy. A loud, buzzing noise inside my head made me feel sick. I closed my eyes momentarily, trying to regain control. What was this? What was wrong with me?
     
    Try as I might, I could make no sense of what I was feeling, of what was happening to me. I opened my eyes again, drawing in the vision before me, the splendour and perfection of another human being, a woman so beautiful that the mere sight of her was capable of reducing me to a mute, quivering idiot.
     
    And then it dawned on me. Despite all my fantasies and daydreams, despite what I knew about my needs and lusts, until that moment I had never really known what true desire was, and that, in its purest form, it was a terrible and frightening thing. I did not know her name or where she had come from. All I knew - to my eternal shame thereafter - was that, whoever she was, I wanted to possess her, entirely.
     

Chapter 5
     
    In those days, whenever anyone asked me what I did for a living, I told them I was a travel writer. This was a lie. I had not, as yet, attempted to put pen to paper, and even on that first trip to India I had made no provision to keep a journal. History records that it was to be three years before I was to publish so much as a single article. If events from that trip have been recorded in any way, then such information resides in the convoluted spirals of my increasingly unreliable memory.
     
    My declaration of so specific a profession was not the result of delusion or a fevered imagination, or even the wish to impress others. Nor did I consider myself a de facto liar. It was more a case of wish fulfilment. I wanted to be a travel writer and believed the swiftest route to achieving this goal was to set out with the firm belief that I was already a member of that select élite.
     
    In retrospect, it is outrageous that I should have persisted with this falsehood, and lauded my mythical reputation with such vehemence. “You haven’t heard of me? But surely... you do read the Sunday papers? You must have seen my name. No? No matter...”
     
    And so on. I believed then that travel writing was my passport to glory, fame, independence, wealth and freedom. More fool me. But such are the dreams of the young, and, despite the fact that I had yet to consign a single descriptive scenario to paper, I felt certain of my vocation and of the glittering prizes that inevitably awaited me.
     
    Of course at that time I did not differentiate between confidence and egoism. Indeed, if anyone dared accuse me of egocentricity, I would flare up at them, angered by the implied defamation. But this is no crime, and whilst I may regret some of my more