Nine Divided By Two

The conversation had been circling for days. They hadn't got to the core of it. The problem. The big wall on the obstacle course they had never been able to climb over. First they'd stood hand in hand and stared at the brick wall but not long ago she felt how their fingers had swiftly touched as they'd let go of each other. "You have to trust me." he kept saying. She couldn't help but play the tiny section from Moulin Rouge in her head when he said that. The one where the passionate latino character yells "Without trust there is no love!" One time when he said it, she had acted it out and broken into an amateur pasodoble. He had not found it funny. "You can't awkwardly moonwalk away from the issues we have." he said one day when she had indeed attempted that. She didn't know if she agreed with the quote from Moulin Rouge, actually. Because she loved him. But she didn't trust him. Or maybe it wasn't love, since she didn't trust him? Why did a musical dictate this? "What do you want me to do?" she suddenly said one day when they were peeling potatoes for dinner in silence. "To peel your half." he said and kept his eyes on his hands peeling a potato. "Well, I am." she said and looked at him. "No, you stopped." he said and pushed a few more potatoes to her side of the sink. She took up a potato and pushed one back to his side. He put the potato he just peeled into the pot and pushed the potato she'd just put on his side back to hers. She looked at it. And smiled cheekishly before she flicked some of the water in the sink on his lower arms. He stopped his movements and threw the peeler into the sink and turned to dry the water off. "Come on." she said and giggled a forced giggle to make up for his anger. "No." he said and looked out the window while he dried his arms with the blue kitchen towel they'd gotten as a joke on their first weekend away together. They'd joked about being the sappy couple who bought a certain kind of souvenir whereever they went and had sarcastically decided on kitchen towels. One kitchen towel had turned into nine. He sighed and she could hear his breathing was shaky as if he was about to cry. "Please." she said and put her arms around her and turned her head and pressed her left cheek against his back. He didn't put his hands on hers as he usually did when she hugged him like this. He took a deep breath and stood up straighter, still looking out the window. "What do you want me to do?" she asked again softly, trying to hold him together. "I want you to take this seriously. You can't divide nine by two and get two whole numbers." he said dangled the kitchen towel for a bit before he put it on the kitchen counter.