She pulled away, and Spork yanked their hand back, heart suddenly thudding in their throat. Damn. Damn. She was going to walk out, wasn’t she? They had messed up, somehow, and made her more upset, and now Mari was going to give them the silent treatment while she sorted things out on her own. They hated when she did that. It was their fault, though, and they knew it, so they resigned themself to their fate, lips pressed tightly together so they didn’t add even more time to their sentence.
But she didn’t storm out. She sat beside them, and Spork was choking on too many half-formed questions to do more than sit there, silent, tense, and incredibly confused. Her forehead collided awkwardly with their shoulder, her chest brushing lightly against their arm when she took a shaky breath, but it wasn’t until she made a small, snuffly sort of sound that they realized what was happening.
She was crying. Oh, they were going to kill that boy.
“Hey, hey,” they started, soft, awkward, hands hovering around her. Shit, they didn’t know what to do. Mari never cried. Or, at least, she never cried around them. Forget uncharted waters, they might as well have been at the bottom of the Mariana Trench with how out of their depth they were. Should they get her mom?
Then she wailed, a high, pained sound that struck Spork right in the heart, and all of a sudden she was falling into them, and they were pulling her further in, their arms moving to wrap around her without them even making the decision to do that. Their shirt was definitely going to get damp with tears, not to mention crumpled where Mari had it balled up in her fists, but it didn’t even matter. Her pointy elbow was digging into their thigh, and they were pretty sure their quiet cussing was falling more into her hair than her ear, but that didn’t matter either.
“I’ve got you,” they told her, and their voice only shook a little bit. God, they were not the right person to be here, doing this. They were awful at comforting people. But it was Mari, and she was crying, and they had to do something. Their voice caught in their throat when they tried to speak again, but they cleared it with as quiet of a cough as they could manage. “It’s gonna be okay? Um…”
Shit, what were they supposed to say? Without thinking about it, they loosened the grip on one of their hands, making to flick their hair out of their eyes again as they stalled for time, but they stopped when she seemed to start crying harder. Fuck. They put their hand back, hoisting her closer. “It’s okay! I’m not going anywhere!”
That seemed to settle her, at least a little bit, and they breathed a little easier, letting their head rest on hers as they slumped in relief. Was that really it? She thought they would leave?
“I’m not going anywhere,” they repeated, more firmly, pressing their nose into her hair. The statement felt larger than a promise, they thought. It was a deal, maybe, a new branch to the tether. Or maybe it was something else entirely. They didn’t even think about taking it back. They just pressed their chapped lips against the crown of her skull and smiled shakily. “You’re stuck with me.”