The less he heard about mindblowing orgasms the better at the moment. Bruce was willing himself at this point to only hear half of what was being said, it would help him be rational and useful. "Sex isn't meaningless, Tony. I know you're going to say it is, from your experience, that it's possible, but sex is complicated. There's the fact he's a stranger, you've known him what a few weeks, you can't possibly know how simple or complicated something is going to be with a person you only just met. Or how healthy and safe, you don't know him, he could be a psychopath or a bad guy in his world. People say all the time sex doesn't matter to them, until it does, or maybe it does matter to someone you know, or someone they know, and that person could show up here."

Bruce trusted very few people, and especially with the body and hearts of the people he cared about. He was paranoid at the best of times, and he didn't like unknowns stomping into carefully tread ground. Or unknowns taking advantage of traumatized grief stricken geniuses to get what they wanted out of it. "It's not like I want you to go get drunk or high all the time, but this isn't the lesser of all unhealthy coping mechanisms either."

He was miserable from top to bottom at the moment. He was speaking his mind because he wasn't a yes man, outside of when Tony really needed one, but it felt awful. "You think I don't understand needing distractions? I wish it was simple." He'd never had access to any of those vices. He couldn't drink or get high, he couldn't have sex. So Bruce was force to find other ways. "I'm sorry, I want to ... I want to be what you need, but I don't know what she would want for me to do here." Pepper had her head on straight, always. Would she be supportive? Would she be hurt? She was kind to him. She was a good reason he stayed on that line, that he never strayed across.