Across the hall.

Maren had bought Weisswurst.

She'd set the table on her balcony despite the October chill -- checked tablecloth, sweet mustard in a clay pot, a paper bag from Backerei Sedlmeier with Brezeln still warm enough to fog the paper. The sausages sat plump and white in their pot of hot water, skins taut. There was Weissbier. At eight in the morning. Because in Bavaria, Weisswurst before noon was not a meal but a sacrament, and drinking beer with it was not alcoholism but liturgy.

She was wearing his shirt from last night. Inside-out, hanging off one shoulder. Bare legs. Water droplets from a shower catching the morning light on her collarbones.

"You were gone when I woke up," she said. Not accusatory -- careful. The voice of a woman who'd been left before and was calibrating how much to care.

"I had to see Linh. Work stuff."

"At seven in the morning?"

"She's an early riser."

Maren studied him for a moment -- the corporate lawyer's X-ray, reading the deposition behind the testimony. Then she let it go. "Sit. Eat."

He sat. Peeled his first Weisswurst in a single practiced motion -- slit, strip, the pale meat flecked with parsley and lemon zest. Dipped in mustard. The gentle sweetness of the veal, the grainy tang of the Senf, the salt-crack of the Brezel -- breakfast as it had existed in this corner of Germany for two hundred years, unchanged by apps or algorithms or artificial intelligence.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. "About... everything?"

"Good. Scared. Confused." He tore a Brezel. "Horny. Then scared about being horny. Then horny again."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, sudden and ungraceful, the kind that showed her back teeth. "God. Same. I woke up and my first thought was about your cock and my second thought was 'is it normal to think about cock before coffee' and my third thought was 'nothing about this is normal, shut up and make coffee.'"

The fog was lifting beyond the balcony railing. The first mountain appeared through the white -- the Wendelstein, its peak sharpening like a memory coming into focus.

"I had four orgasms last night," she said. She was looking at the mountain, not at him. "Four. I didn't know that was still... I thought that part of me had -- after the divorce, after Stefan, after a year of absolutely nothing, I thought..." She trailed off. Picked up her Weissbier, put it down without drinking. "I'm not good at this."

"At what?"

"At saying what I mean when it matters. I was a lawyer for nine years, Lukas. I could argue a motion for summary judgment in my sleep. But sitting here in your shirt trying to explain why last night mattered to me --" She shook her head. "I keep rehearsing lines in my head and they all sound like Hallmark cards."

"Try anyway."

She was quiet. Drank the Weissbier this time. Watched a kestrel circle above the Pfarrkirche steeple.

"I think the app gave us the excuse," she said finally. "Not the feeling. The excuse. I wanted to knock on your door for months. Since the Kaiserschmarrn. But you were over there listening to Rammstein at a volume that was basically a 'do not disturb' sign, and I was over here teaching strangers how to engage their pelvic floor, and neither of us could --" She stopped. Started again. "The app didn't make me want you. It made me brave enough to show it. Does that make sense? Or is that just something I'm telling myself so I don't have to think about the fact that a phone grew my tits?"

It was clumsy. It was imperfect. It was the truest thing she'd said to him.

"It makes sense," he said.

She stood. Came around the table. The shift from breakfast to sex was not graceful -- she bumped the mustard pot with her hip and caught it without breaking eye contact, which was both absurd and somehow the sexiest thing he'd seen her do. She straddled his lap on the balcony chair, the checked tablecloth bunching under her knee. She wore nothing underneath the shirt.

"The Mullers are at Kirchgang," she murmured. "And I want you before the Weisswurst gets cold."

He was already hard. Had been since she stood up, since the shirt shifted and he saw the bare underside of her thigh and the shadow above it. She reached between them without looking -- her fingers finding him through his boxers with the certainty of someone who'd mapped him the night before and still had the coordinates. She freed him, wrapped her hand around the shaft, and he felt the cool October air hit the wet tip at the exact moment the church bells started across town. Eight o'clock. The Müllers were kneeling in a pew two hundred meters away, and Maren Hofstetter was settling onto his cock on a balcony above Grafing's quietest street.

She took him in one slow drop. Not a thrust -- a lowering, controlled, her weight shifting forward as her hips tilted to find the angle. And then she was fully seated and neither of them moved for a moment. The chair creaked. A pigeon clattered off the neighbor's gutter. The fog thinned another degree and a second peak appeared behind her -- the Breitenstein, still soft at the edges, not yet committed to being real.

Then she moved. And the word for what Maren did with her hips was not bouncing and not grinding but something between the two that Lukas had no vocabulary for -- a slow, circular rotation that started in her lower abdominals and traveled through her pelvis in a wave. Pilates precision. He'd heard her say the phrase to clients through the wall a hundred times. Now he understood what it meant from underneath. Her core did the work. Not her legs, not her knees -- the deep muscles low in her belly, the ones she'd spent three years teaching strangers to locate, contracting in a rhythm that squeezed him on the forward roll and released on the back, so that every rotation was a pulse of pressure that tightened around his cock like a fist closing and opening, closing and opening.

"Christ," he said.

"Shh." She put a finger on his lips. Not playful -- practical. The Schneiders had a balcony twelve meters to the left. Herr Schneider was deaf but Frau Schneider could hear a rumor forming three streets away.

He shut up. Put his hands on her hips instead. Then higher -- under the shirt, his palms traveling up her ribs to the breasts that were different now, fuller, the Sculpt having added volume that his hands couldn't fully close around anymore. Before the upgrade he could cup her entirely. Now the flesh spilled over his fingers, warm and heavy and taut with cold -- her nipples drawn tight by the October air, stiff against his palms. He pushed the shirt up. It bunched around her collarbones. Her breasts in the morning light were absurd, beautiful, pale skin prickling into gooseflesh as the cold hit them, and she arched her back and the angle changed and the sound she made was quiet enough to be plausible as a cough if Frau Schneider was listening.

The Alps kept sharpening. The Wendelstein, the Breitenstein, then the jagged teeth of the Kaisergebirge emerging from the mist like a developing photograph. Behind Maren's shoulder the whole Voralpenland was assembling itself, peak by white peak, and she kept moving -- that slow, devastating rotation that wasn't fast enough to end things but wasn't slow enough to let him think. The chair creaked with each roll. On the table beside them the Weißwurst sat cooling in their pot, the sweet mustard congealing, the Brezeln going stiff in the autumn air, and none of it mattered because Maren's internal muscles were doing something he had no frame of reference for -- a rippling contraction that started at the base of his cock and traveled upward, a milking motion so precise it felt almost mechanical except for the heat, the wet, the slight tremor in her thighs that said she was closer than her pace let on.

The smell of everything mixed: coffee going cold, Weißwurst, the yeast of the Brezeln, the sweet-sour tang of sex in open air. Sweat on both of them despite the cold -- her sternum damp, a bead running between her breasts, his hands sliding on her hips. The church bells had stopped. The fog was almost gone. Somewhere on the street below a dog barked once and stopped, as if embarrassed.

She braced her hands on his shoulders and ground down hard -- not the controlled rotation now but a flat, urgent pressure, her clit against his pubic bone, her breath catching in stacked half-gasps she tried to swallow. Her thighs tightened around his hips. She squeezed him internally with a **** that made his vision blur.

She came with her forehead pressed against his, her mouth open, no sound. Her whole body tightened and held -- a five-second contraction that gripped his cock so hard he felt his own orgasm dragged out of him like a word pulled from a throat. He came inside her quietly -- a slow pulse, not a roar -- but the Balls I upgrade meant the pulse kept going, kept filling, a warmth that spread between them and then overflowed. He felt the excess run down the base of his shaft, felt it pool where their bodies joined and then slip further, warm against the cold air. She exhaled through her nose, forehead still touching his, and he felt her smile against his mouth.

"Well," she whispered. "The Weißwurst is definitely cold now."

His phone buzzed on the table beside the mustard.

PLEROMA: Achievement Unlocked -- Outdoor Encounter. 25 Pneuma earned.

She climbed off his lap, cum running down the inside of her thigh, and picked up a Brezel with the hand that wasn't holding his shirt closed.

"Twenty-five points," she said, chewing. "I wonder what we'd get for doing it in the Pfarrkirche."

"Excommunication."

"Worth it."

She kissed him. Tasted like salt and mustard and beer and the specific sweetness that lingered in both their mouths now -- the trace of something the app had put there, or maybe something it had woken up.

"I have to go to Munich," he said. "Work."

"Tonight. Come back tonight. I'm making Kasespatzle." She paused. "And Lukas -- whatever it is you're not telling me about the app, you can tell me tonight. I can see it sitting behind your eyes."

She was a lawyer. Of course she could see it.