... intimate meal is topless (5)
I believe the answer is:
inner
'intimate' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'meal is topless' is the wordplay.
'meal' becomes 'dinner' (dinner is a kind of meal).
'is topless' means to remove the first letter.
'dinner' with its first letter taken off is 'INNER'.
(Other definitions for inner that I've seen before include "just missing the gold" , "Annulus nearest bull" , "Private, not expressed" , "Located or occurring closer to a centre" , "Central area of a city, often old" .)