Title: Intimacy
Fandom: Roads of Heaven
Challenge: Performance Anxiety
Rating: T
Length: 200
Content notes: Discussion of sex, nothing explicit
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: Denis well knows that sex and intimacy are not the same thing.



Denis enjoys sex. He’s skilled and observant and his body is easily — sometimes inconveniently easily — roused, and is not at all hard to please. (His mind, on the other hand, is not so easily engaged to distraction. Engaged to distract, now that's a different thing entirely.) Giving, receiving, bodies of many forms and expressions. It’s a tool, an exercise, occasionally an act or a weapon or a distraction, useful for a variety of ends. Silence and Julie do know that, they’ve talked about it, but he’s not sure they entirely understand. When he is with them, it’s not like that — there’s a whole other level of feeling, of connection, of importance (they are, have become, quite terrifyingly, desperately important, they matter to him, so much) between them. He's still not sure if he's entirely comfortable with so much vulnerability, but he's, they've, fought much too hard to keep their marriage and make it work to poke at it.

Sometimes though, what he really wants is intimacy, comfort, without the need for performance, without any agenda, even the happy intent of pleasing his partners: to be wrapped in Julie and Silence’s embrace, held close and safe and warm against the cold.