”Play it again.”

In my dream, he stands over me like a phantom. His eyes are a furious red like I always imagined them to be, though I know they’re really just brown. His brows knit as I raise the violin to my chin again and prepare to play it all over.

In my dream, I know that I’ve been standing there and playing for hours. My fingers are bloody and torn to shreds, but daddy doesn’t care. I’m nine years old and I should be a prodigy by now, but I’m not. According to daddy, if I’m not the best at what I do, I’m not worth anything.

And so I play it again. I go through the notes, playing as best as I possibly can considering blood runs down the strings, but that doesn’t matter to him. He simply sits there, smoking a cigar and watching me. I don’t look at his face, because I know what I’ll see if I do.

When I finish, he stands and walks over to me. He slaps the violin from my hands and growls.

“Pathetic,” he says. “What the fuck am I paying these teachers for if you can’t play right?”

I cower away from him, waiting for him to hit me, but the blow never comes. It never does. He hit me once, out of anger, but not since then. Still, he threatens it all the time, and I believe he’ll do it if I give him a real reason to.

“I’m sorry, daddy,” I whimper.

“Sorry isn’t going to make you better, girl,” he says. “How the fuck are you going to take over everything I’m building if you can’t even master one instrument? It’s not even a fucking hard one, for fuck’s sake.” He stalks away and I collapse onto the floor, sobbing.

He stands by the bar with a glass in his hand. He always has a glass in his hand. He’s a drunk, a mean stupid drunk, and I hate him. In the dream, which is also a memory, I know that he’s a piece of shit but I can’t do anything about it.

I’m just a little girl and I still love him. I barely see him anymore, and when I do, it’s always painful, but he’s still a towering figure in my life. I want to live up to him. I believe everything he tells me. I believe every bit of pressure he puts on me. I feel it weighing on me every night, and every night I cry myself to sleep because I’m such a disappointment.

“Maybe I’ll leave you too,” he sneers at me. “Just like your mother left you. She knew you were pathetic garbage. Do you want me to leave you?”

“No!” I cry out, terrified.

“Good,” he says. “Play it again.”

I stand up and retrieve the violin. One of the strings is broken but I know I can’t say anything about it. I retrieve my bow and stand before him, ready to play. He nods and I raise my instrument.

He loves it. I can see through him in my dream, into his mind, and I know he loves this. He loves pushing me, prodding me, seeing how far he can go. Threatening to leave is his favorite little game, especially when he gets to tell me how my mother thought I wasn’t worth being around. It’s impossible to imagine what that does to a little girl, the sort of incredible heartbreaking sadness it instills inside of her. It’s the sort of madness that she’ll turn to drugs to numb when she turns into a woman.

But for now, all I know how to do is play. I strike the first note as my father advances on me, grinning his evil grin, stinking of gin and looking to humiliate me some more.

I wake up sweating and he’s there in my bed. I swat at him, trying to get away, terrified of him. He’s coming and he’s going to keep making me play.

“Aria!” His hands gently catch my wrists and I’m breathing so fast, but that’s not his voice, and I’m not a little girl.

I’m an adult woman. I’m in Ethan’s home, in his bed, and I’m safe. I’m far away from my father.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Shh, it’s okay.”

Ethan takes me in his arms and pulls me against him.

“Ethan,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s very okay.” He holds me and rocks me until my trembling slowly subsides.

“I heard you screaming,” he says once I’m calmer. “I came in to check on you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m fine though.”

I pull back from him and wipe the hair from my face, trying to smile. He doesn’t need this sort of thing in his life, not with the kind of stress he’s under. He doesn’t need some pathetic girl with horrible scars screaming in the middle of the night and waking him up.

The dream lingers and part of me thinks I’m still that pathetic little girl destined to fail. But I know that I’m not. I ran away and tried to destroy my demons with heroin, but that only made the demons so much worse. In the end, I’m destroying my demons through hard work, but they’re not all gone. Not yet at least.

“Do you have nightmares often?” he asks

I shake my head. “Not for years. I... I used to.” I laugh softly. “I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Really. For a second there, I thought you were being murdered.”

“I’m safe and sound,” I say more for myself.

He nods and studies me for a second, putting his hand on my face. It’s warm and feels good. I lean into it, smiling.

“Can I ask you what the dream was about?” I look at him, a little surprised. He quickly goes on. “That’s helped me, in the past. Talking about the horrible dreams.”

“You have nightmares?”

“I used to. Back when my company started growing faster than I was ready for. I was under a lot of pressure back then.” He laughs a little bit. “I used to dream about drowning every night. My peers and employees would be standing outside of a giant fish tank, laughing as I drowned. It was pretty bad.”

“Sounds awful,” I say.

“If you want to tell me about it, I’ll listen. I understand if you don’t.”

I pause, thinking. I’ve never told anyone about the dreams before. I’ve woken others up with my screaming, but I always just make some excuse and pretend like it’s no big deal. I thought I was past this, but apparently not.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” he says quickly. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” I say. “I want to tell you.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod and take a deep breath. “I played violin when I was a little girl. My father, sometimes he’d get drunk and watch me practice. Once he made me practice for hours, the same song over and over until my fingers bled. He would tell me that I’m a disappointment and that’s why my mother died. I dream about that afternoon sometimes, and in my dream I know that my father wants to humiliate me and destroy me, but I can’t help it. I’m a little girl again.”

He shakes his head, frowning. “Is that true?”

I nod. “It’s true. It happened. It’s... part of why I ran away. Why I turned to drugs.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says softly. “That’s horrible.”

“I think he meant well at first. But as the years passed, he became bitter, and started taking it out on me. I was just a little girl so I didn’t understand. My father was a towering figure in my life. He was everything to me. When he said I was a failure, I believed him.” I look away from Ethan, trying not to cry. “I stopped playing violin after that afternoon. I refused. He never hit me, but he yelled a lot. The yelling was worse.”

“I can relate to that.”

I look at him, surprised. He pulls away and lies down next to me, hands behind his head, looking up at the top of the canopy.

“My father thought computers were for sissies and pussies,” he says. “His biggest dream in life was for me to join him working at the police department.” He glances at me and grins. “My father is a cop, by the way.”

“I had no clue.”

“I don’t talk about it. My dad was a grade-A asshole and still is. We don’t really talk much. My mother is okay, but she didn’t really do much to stop my father from being a dick. He was constantly talking down to me, constantly telling me that I was a pussy and a piece of shit for sitting in front of my computer all the time.” He sighs, trailing off.

“That’s hard. When your parents don’t believe in you.”

“There was other stuff, too,” he says softly. “He tried to toughen me up.”

“How?” I ask, lying next to him. I put my hand on his chest.

“Beat the shit out of me,” he says. “He’d be hitting me, saying it’s for my own good, although I’m pretty sure he just liked doing it. But all that abuse just made me more driven to get the fuck out of there.”

“I can understand that,” I say.

“I got lucky. My company worked and shit took off for me. But if I stayed in that house much longer, my father would have killed me, or I would have killed him. There was no happy ending for me there.”

“But you got out.”

He nods and looks at me. “You did too.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He takes my hand and squeezes. “Hey. We both got out.”

“You’re right.” I curl up next to him, my head on his chest. “We did.”

I close my eyes as we lapse into silence. I don’t want to push him for more of his story, but I can imagine it. I lived some of it, I bet. It’s amazing that he ended up here and I ended up here too, but we took such different paths. Similar beginnings, but such different choices and events.

I can feel sleep tugging me down, and I want to resist it since he’s still here, but I can’t. All I hear is his breath and his heartbeat thumping slowly in my ear. It’s comforting, and when I finally go back under, I don’t dream anymore.

It’s just peaceful and calm. There’s nothing else.