“I never meant to push you away,” he began. “I need you to believe that.”
Mallory let out a short, humorless laugh. “Well, your actions have a strange way of showing things you don’t mean.”
“I know.” He leaned forward and braced his forearms on his knees. “Everything happened too fast. Meeting you, spending time together, it felt like a different life. A quiet one. And I wanted it more than I should have.”
She watched him carefully. “Then why shut me out?”
“Because my life is not quiet,” he said. “And the more I cared about you, the more dangerous it felt to let you in.”
Her brows drew together. “Dangerous?”
“My world is complicated, Mallory. Political. Public. There are expectations and obligations you can’t imagine. Once you’re part of it, you don’t get to change your mind. People watch you. Judge you. Use you.” He swallowed. “I didn’t want that for you.”
“So you decided for me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Well, congratulations. You protected me so well I ended up hurt anyway.”
The quiet pain in her voice was worse than anger. Jakob closed his eyes for a moment and felt the cold air sting his lungs.
“That was never my intention.”
“You don’t get to decide what happened.”
He turned toward her fully then. “I know. And I’m sorry. More sorry than I know how to say.”
Mallory studied her gloved hands. “You disappeared, Jakob. You let me leave. No calls. No explanation. Just… gone.”
“I thought distance would make it easier.”
“Easier for who?”
The question hung between them, sharp and fair.
“For me,” he admitted at last.
She let out a long breath that turned to mist in the frigid air. “At least you’re honest.”
He nodded before he forced himself to continue. This was the part he’d rehearsed in his head a hundred times and still wasn’t sure he could say correctly.
“There’s something else you deserve to hear,” he said. “About last night.”
Her shoulders stiffened.
“I didn’t plan it,” he went on carefully. “I never intended to cross that line with you.”
Color rose in her cheeks despite the cold, but she didn’t look away.
“I made love to you because I gave in to my true feelings,” Jakob said quietly. “Not because I was careless. Not because it didn’t matter. The opposite, actually.”
Mallory blinked but didn’t speak.
“I need you to understand that,” he continued. “What happened between us was real to me. You are real to me.”
For a moment she simply stared at him, as if weighing whether to believe he meant it.
“And yet you keep me at arms length,” she whispered.
