[It wouldn't have shocked him if Zoro hadn't answered, if he'd balked, if he'd snapped something back at him, and maybe not even out of stubbornness.
Vrenille, as it turns out, has a lot of experience in this area--not just sex, but listening. Listening to what men want about sex, even when they maybe can't say it, don't know it, have never quite figured it out. That's experience he gained long before he came to Duplicity. It's experience he literally survived by for years.
Zoro has never struck him as a man who doesn't know himself, though sometimes it happens that men know themselves well in every area except the sexual. Vrenille has known plenty of guys who've left erotic desire as the one dark continent in their lives, something cast out, cast low, a sort of adversary. So he's really ready for anything as far as an answer goes, and in the one he gets, he listens not just to the words but to the shape of things behind them where it's more a matter of feeling his way than reasoning it.
With a soft sound of assent, he nods once.]
When you start out, haven't done it much before, it comes on quick. It's a limit. You have to come back. Do it again. And again. Patient. And then the distance grows. And one day your lungs burn, but you don't gotta stop--it's like it's...with you, not against, and then it's like you can fly.
[That's in his own experience, the coordinate he can relate the question to. But tacitly, it's also a question in return, and he's watching Zoro closely to see what he does with it, whether the words resonate, coming close to something for him, or land wide of the mark.]
no subject
Vrenille, as it turns out, has a lot of experience in this area--not just sex, but listening. Listening to what men want about sex, even when they maybe can't say it, don't know it, have never quite figured it out. That's experience he gained long before he came to Duplicity. It's experience he literally survived by for years.
Zoro has never struck him as a man who doesn't know himself, though sometimes it happens that men know themselves well in every area except the sexual. Vrenille has known plenty of guys who've left erotic desire as the one dark continent in their lives, something cast out, cast low, a sort of adversary. So he's really ready for anything as far as an answer goes, and in the one he gets, he listens not just to the words but to the shape of things behind them where it's more a matter of feeling his way than reasoning it.
With a soft sound of assent, he nods once.]
When you start out, haven't done it much before, it comes on quick. It's a limit. You have to come back. Do it again. And again. Patient. And then the distance grows. And one day your lungs burn, but you don't gotta stop--it's like it's...with you, not against, and then it's like you can fly.
[That's in his own experience, the coordinate he can relate the question to. But tacitly, it's also a question in return, and he's watching Zoro closely to see what he does with it, whether the words resonate, coming close to something for him, or land wide of the mark.]