Oh she looked like she was ready to deck him. Frankly he was kind of relieved. Jess could do a good fight, he couldn't handle the silent treatment. "You couldn't see your face," Frankly it had been kind of hard to read in the moment and he still wasn't sure what about it made him balk like he had, but the expression and body language hadn't matched the words (at least in his memory).

"The last thing I wanted to do was make anything more difficult for you after everything you'd been through." He'd already said as much, but apparently hadn't made himself very clear. "What we'd come up with in letters wasn't incredibly practical, you had every right to question it, which made me in turn think about my approach, how much trouble it could cause." He ran a hand through his hair in frustration, huffing a little. "I thought stepping back would give you the time and space you deserved. I would never want this to impact your work or your life negatively." He felt like he was ranting, but now that he'd started he needed to get it all out.

Of course he'd said all of this already- in letters but her response had been unexpected. "Then you sent everything back and I didn't know what to do." She'd made her point pretty clear. "I wanted to step back a little and you shoved me out the door."