A pause can feel comfortable until somebody announces that it is awkward.

Silence has no fixed meaning until somebody assigns one. Two people can sit through half a minute of nothing quite happily, and then one says this is awkward, and it instantly is, because the label creates the thing it claims to describe. Everyone in the room now has to respond to a problem that did not exist a moment earlier. Naming a mood is often the act that produces it.

Let the next quiet stretch pass without commentary. If you feel the urge to explain the silence, that urge is usually about your own discomfort rather than about anything happening in the room.