He froze, physically stuck between hugging her back and running away in a fit. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to think of happy, clean things. Going through a mental list of things his shrink was always telling him he needed to do in cases like this- to help him over come his...problems.
"Uh...Uh...You're welcome..." But he wasn't entirely sure why she was sobbing on him. Was this a normal reaction? Did girls normally do things like this when they were given flowers? "Are you okay?"
Was he supposed to have hugged her back? He didn't know, even as he shook his head about the tissue. "I'll find you some..." The bathrooms were bound to have something, and he brought gloves this time.
"You just wait right here. I'll get some." He said even as he pulled out his gloves to snap on.
Frankie squeezed his shoulder slightly to make him stop. "No, no no. It's okay, look-" she grabbed a napkin off of the refreshment table and wiped her face until she felt respectable again.
Heaving a sigh, she gave Brian a real smile this time and laughed slightly. "You must think I'm crazy" he said, stroking the fake petals of one of the flowers. "These are beautiful. Thank you so much."
He watched her as she tidied up, smiling a little bit. Why was she so sad? Did she have food poisoning? Maybe he shouldn't eat anything from the school! No- no, stop it, stop it. He didn't want to be like that right now.
But food poisoning was a pretty serious thing.
"N-no, not crazy. I'm crazy." He assured her with a weak smile, "why are you sad? Did you get food poisoning? I could get you something to fix that."
"You're not crazy you're just.. highly strung" Frankie said, fixing his hair from where it had mussed up from her hug.
Ignoring the bizarre suggestion that she would eat in the first place, she sighed and looked down at her feet. "I had an argument with Tatum. For no reason, I just wanted to shout at her."
He didn't pull away when she touched his hair. It was surprising to him, but nice. Silly, but nice. It was, in his mind, forward movement in the ever raging battle to get over his...problems.
Or he just liked her too much to pull away.
"Did you say you were sorry?" He asked a bit dumbly, blinking at her confession.
One side of her mouth curled up into a smile and she shook her head. "I don't really say sorry" she confessed, quirking her head and deciding to change the subject before anyone else got mad at her tonight.
"Hey, your hands look good" she said. "Was the potion okay?"
"Oh," well that wasn't very good. 'Sorry' had a way of working even when you didn't want it to. He father had always said 'sorry' and his mother had forgiven him. So surely Frankie's Tatum would forgive her? Right? "Maybe you could...try?"
But then she was on to his hands. Looking down, he peered at them before he looked up and nodded with a smile. "Yeah, it worked well."