Rachel Lacey's "Cover Story" Gets Soft Butches and PTSD So Right

Feeling safe and supported is the thing that allows people with trauma to actually turn toward our difficult pasts and acknowledge that we are worth being cared for.

My biggest fear, in my grown-up life, has always been going to sleep. Not because I think I won't wake up or anything like that. Not because I'm scared of anything bad happening to my actual physical body while I'm dozing the night away. No, I'm afraid of sleep because in my waking life, I feel powerful and resilient and safe and capable and loved — but when I'm asleep, I relive my worst traumas over and over and over again, in a twisted, vivid, vicious cycle that seems to have no end. I wake up covered in sweat, chest heaving, fists balled up, my whole body crunched into a defensive curl. It's not as bad as it used to be. It used to be every night, and I used to wake up swinging and yelling out. Now it's only a few times a month, and I have very good grounding and coping mechanisms in place for when I resurface from my nightmares. 

While lots of therapists, physicians, and psychiatrists have affirmed my complex PTSD diagnosis over the years, none of them have had The Answer for making the night terrors stop. I've tried the many therapy methods, all kinds of medications, any and every pre-sleep routine you can imagine. What eventually curbed the nightmares was my brain and body rewiring itself over many years of living in the safety of my home with my wife, and removing myself from toxic, chronically stressful environments in my waking life. It's been a long, slow journey full of stops and starts and setbacks and leaps forward, but I can look back on it now and truly see how much I've healed and how far I've come. I feel really proud about it, actually. Growing up as a neglected and abused kid, your primary orientation to the world is one of threat, fear, and survival. It's not easy to break out of those confines and seek safe and healthy relationships! It's like picking up an entire train and setting it down on a whole different set of tracks! 

I'd never met someone who wrestles with CPTSD in the same ways I do, until I met Natalie Keane, one of the protagonists in Rachel Lacey's new sapphic romance, Cover Story. Natalie is an A-List actress who went through a horrible experience in her early adult life that's left her deeply traumatized. She hates going to sleep because of the nightmares she can't control, and because of the terror she feels every single time she wakes up. In her waking life, she's a charismatic, in-control, doing-her-own-stunts, badass superstar. In her sleeping life, no matter how many safety measures she has in place, she's helpless, the way she one time was in her real life. Even the people closest to her write her off when she explains how afraid she is, so when the man who wrecked her life gets freed from prison, she hires an extra bodyguard to stay with her at home. 

Enter: Taylor Vaughn, who you might remember as Eden Sands sexy, soft butch bodyguard from Stars Collide. But it's okay if you don't; her role in Eden Sands life was to be an invisible source of constant protection. It's not that easy when it comes to Natalie Keane, because she doesn't want the press to notice that she's acting even more scared than usual, so she hires Taylor to protect her, while posing as her fake girlfriend. Only, Taylor quickly begins to understand that she doesn't just want to keep Natalie safe from harm, she wants to make Natalie feel safe, in her home and in her body and in her heart. Her job is to jump between Natalie and any bad guy coming at her, but Taylor’s soft butch protection instincts go into overdrive when she starts getting real feelings for Natalie. She doesn't simply want to stand between Natalie and what she's afraid of; she wants to wrap Natalie up in her whole-hearted care, so she doesn't even have to be afraid at all. 

That's complicated for Taylor, and it gets even more knotty when she starts to grapple with a spinal injury that's just not healing. She hates feeling weak more than just about anything. If she can't protect people, who even is she? If she's not the strongest person — physically and emotionally — in any room at any time, what kind of soft butch is she supposed to be? 

Rachel Lacey never calls Taylor a soft butch, but I'm calling her that because I'm a soft butch and I've imprinted onto her like a baby duck. She reminds me of myself even more than Natalie with her CPTSD. 

That's one of the things I love most about sapphic romances written by queer people: They're safe places to let your guard down, to sink into the pages, and arrive in another world, one where we can play out endless possibilities for our own selves, without ever worrying about getting punished for being gay, or troped into oblivion by another straight writer who thinks they're the one who can torture their gays in fresh and original and satisfying ways. LGBTQ+ people are on the receiving end of a whole lot of cruelty in the wide world of storytelling, but not in sapphic romances. It's a guaranteed Happily Ever After, but not without some real processing and obstacle-crushing along the way. In the case of Natalie and Taylor, they have their individual internal hindrances to overcome, and the external obstructions the world throws at every good love story. 

Actually, "overcome" is too strong of a word. One thing Rachel Lacey never asserts, in any of her books, is that you have to be a perfectly whole and a completely healthy person to deserve love. The best kind of love empowers you to make real strides in your journey of overcoming. It helps you heal. But it doesn't simply "fix" you by its existence. And anyway, seeing a character overcome PTSD in a 300 pages would fall flat. Healing relationships allow us to gently recognize and take responsibility for the things we do that perpetuate our own trauma; they allow us to see the ways we re-create the relationships that caused our trauma; and they provide safety where we can engage in the good kind of conflict and set the rewarding kind of boundaries that make us and our relationships better. Healing PTSD isn't a linear experience, and Rachel Lacey just gets that so very right in Natalie and Taylor's world. 

With the exception of my wife — who I just couldn't help myself with, because I wanted to with her every possible minute — I've tried really hard to avoid being in overnight situations with other people for as long as I can remember. Because I don't have control over what's going to happen in my sleep, and I don't want other people to see me in my most terrified and vulnerable moments. Because it's hard to re-orient and re-ground myself in unfamiliar spaces. Because I'm already walking a very thin line on getting enough sleep and I absolutely will not do so when I'm away from my own controlled environment, which always results in me getting sick and crashing for weeks afterward. It also takes me a while after getting home for my body to know where it is when I wake up, and knowing where I am is one of the keys to helping me feel safe. 

These days, my CPTSD doesn't manifest in night terrors every time I go to sleep. I don't wake up panicked and terrified every time I break through a dream. But when I do, I immediately reach out and put my hand on my wife, who's sleeping adorably right beside me. I take some deep breaths. I feel my soft pillow against my cheek, the silky sheets against my legs, the steady breathing of the person I love most in the world, the person who would do anything to keep me safe. I smell the Burt's Bees lotion she put on before bed. I smell the ginger and bergamot and cedar and sandalwood of the candle on my nightstand. And I know the weight of a cat will plop down on top of my chest at any second, as soon as Quasar realizes I'm awake. Reasoning and logic alone can't treat PTSD. But being aware of your body's feedback, really aware, helps you recognize that your past trauma doesn't have any power over you anymore. 

Actually sleeping and waking up without freaking out, when Taylor's nearby, is one of the ways Natalie starts to realize something special is happening for her with her bodyguard. It prompts her to start dropping the fortress she's built around her vulnerabilities, her fears, and her imperfections. Feeling safe and supported is the thing that allows people with trauma to actually turn toward our difficult pasts and acknowledge that we are worth being cared for. 

Reading Cover Story made me think of one of my favorite things Christopher Morley ever wrote: "When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book." And in Rachel Lacey's world, there's also plenty of sapphic swooning and smooching!