Blender Cloth, Single object with two meshes, wanting to keep them joined for first few frames of cloth physics Hello fellow Blenderer's

I am working on a small project where I have a character eating and when the food moves away from mouth I want to form a string of dribble that stretches then separates in half and fall.

as seen in my simple animation here. I am wanting the two middle points to stay joined for longer. Glued if you will!



the Object is a tube which is separated in the middle. I use KeyShapes to make the tube go from thick to skinny in the middle during the animation.



Not sure on how to accomplish gluing them together for longer.
Hook modifier could do it, but there is perhaps a way to do it through simulation which would give better results.