It hadn't occurred to him before that anyone might be able to empathize with his time abroad except Pablo, who had been there. It was just an experience so remarkably different than anything that anyone else he'd met had gone through, and different even than anything he'd ever heard about someone else going through. It was the stuff of fiction, really — which was, he supposed, why it had been so easy for his editor to find authors willing to sensationalize and embellish his own journal entries from the time before he'd published them. The way that she was talking about her time in the Americas, however, and the language that she was using, seemed to imply that maybe she did get it — or at least a part of it, if not the entire experience.

"Do you have tattoos?" he asked suddenly, then realized how utterly inappropriate the question would sound to English ears and immediately blushed. The words had left his mouth before he'd had a chance to think, because for him, this was not a change of topic. His own tattoos, and the stories behind how he had acquired them, were intimately linked with that idea of belonging — and they were symbolic, at this point, not just for the tribe he'd been living with but for his own personal reasons as well. Even in the best of circumstances, though, the question was too personal for someone he'd only just met that afternoon, and if she didn't see the same connection in the topics that he did, it would at least border on offensive.

"I'm sorry," he apologized hastily. "I didn't mean to imply — please, don't answer that. I shouldn't have asked. I'm sorry, really."