Note ... this is an unsolicited outtake for Handcuffs ... Kevan has approved and this was written by Alf with her permission and extensive oversight. It actually should be closer to the beginning, but as I am unsure how to do that these days, and it is just an outtake, you will all kindly forgive me for not doing this by the book.

There have been a couple of edits to where the story, nonstory, is headed and I need a clear head to post that correctly.

Apologies for any confusion this may cause.

Again, Kevan gets the credit as she's letting me play with her writing prompts.

Disclaimers always remain the same ... no money changing hands and no fame or glory either ...

If Handcuffs Could Talk

Outtake #1

by Alf. written in collaboration and with permission of Kevan

Another almost uneventful Friday night was upon the girls and me. Instead of cleaning my apartment, we decided Mary Lou could get rid of the kids and husband for the weekend, and we'd have more room to recover after our nonevent event got underway. They wanted to see if a little tequila might enhance the little movie we'd watched together a couple of weeks ago. Everyone pitched in, and we catered the night of tequila, tortilla chips, salsa, cheese, and veggies. The veggies were for Rex because we didn't want him to feel left out, and he was getting a hamster bag. We also chipped in for a food basket and bouquet for Mary Lou's mother-in-law for watching the kids and Lenny for the night.

"Girl, you need to take a closer look at this," Lula said. She had been tapping on the keyboard, doing something to expand the image on her screen. A couple of years ago, I encouraged Lula to take some computer classes to expand her horizons and possibly gain some additional skills.

"What?" I asked. I shoved my chair closer to hers so I could see the screen a little better. Even though she'd blown up the image of Mal, I couldn't see anything intriguing except for the way his abs made me want to scrub my laundry. This obsession for washboard abs wasn't new; admiring so much available variety, that was what was new.

We'd all been crowded around the dinette, craning our necks, trying to see what Lula was so focused on.

Mary Lou reached over to jiggle the mouse, and miracle of miracles, the image on the screen appeared on the television. God love Lenny and his need to watch hockey on a screen that was almost life-size. I have no idea how big that television was, but it took over most of the wall in their den.

"This little scrap of nothing," she said. She walked over to the screen and pointed at a small, beige rectangle on Mal's hip.

"What are you talking about? I don't see anything," I said. Who cared if I had my fingers jammed in my pockets, and they were crossed. I saw plenty. I'd seen plenty more. I didn't want to own up to it because owning up meant living down. Crap.

"Obviously, she's never been a mother," Mary Lou said. "She can't find a bandage on her own arm when someone's putting it on her."

I could so recognize a bandage being applied to my own skin. I'd had a lot of them. They usually hurt like a bitch when they were pulled off. Because I seemed to go through a lot of them, I now bought the off brands that didn't stick real well and I always made sure my knees were well shaved. My life gave me plenty of reasons to look for new and improved methods of getting blood out of the knees of my jeans.

"Hey, I'd be willing to kiss that boo-boo better," Connie said. I didn't remember the last time Connie had had a date. Probably she'd be willing to do more than just kiss his boo-boo. Based on the glazed look in her eyes, we might not be able to get Connie to make a complete, cognitive sentence by the end of the evening. Not necessarily a bad thing.

"I wonder if he's got anything else that's in need of kissing," Mary Lou said. "It could be fun. Especially if I could get amnesty from my marriage for a couple of days."

"You don't mean that," I said. "You love Lenny and the kids."

Mary Lou took a shot of the tequila, snorted, and sighed. Then she snorted again. "Yeah, but on his best day, Lenny never looked like that. I mean, he was fine. He is fine. Just fine. Fine. Yeah, Lenny's fine." Each fine got more and more wistful. I'd bet a dollar he was either going to wind up on a new diet or get a gym membership for his next birthday. "But even in his prime, he's never had the stamina to go for five or six hours. And this guy," she said, and she pointed to the frozen image on the TV, "looks like he could go five or six hours several days in a row." She sighed again and crammed some tortilla chips in her mouth. We were going to have to call out for delivery of Mexican food before much longer. I thought three big bags of tortilla chips would be enough. Obviously, I was wrong. I still had the bakery phone number saved to my phone. Maybe I could call them and we could by all of the unsold pastries at a discount. We might just need it if they saw where Ranger had been keeping his special bandage.

"See your doctor first," Lula said. She loaded more of the chunky salsa on her chip than it could hold. It broke. She tried again. The third time she broke a chip, she finally realized she needed to have a little less salsa on the thing. "That kind of stamina sounds like fun, but you need a couple of prescriptions, a bunch of protein, and a workout plan first. Probably even rubber sheets. Oh, and don't forget you are going to want to wax everything a couple of days in advance. Oh, and don't forget to hydrate. Hydration is key to surviving a long session with a man like that." The list sounded daunting, but seemed so much worse because Lula had begun to count on all of her fingers. She closed her eyes, and I knew she was searching her memory for more bits of advice. Please, God, oh, pretty pretty please, don't make this list much longer.

"Party pooper," Mary Lou said. "I said it sounded like fun. I'd never actually do anything like that." She thumped her fist on her thigh. "It isn't like I don't go to the gym. I could go more and actually get into good shape."

"Twice a year probably isn't enough," Connie said. Connie drove all kinds of circuitous routes just to avoid getting anywhere near the gym. She'd almost gone into one once but saved herself by going into a bakery to get some cannoli instead. Good call.

True. But twice a year was two times more than I usually went. I didn't avoid it by driving past it. I avoided it by going anywhere else and pretending it wasn't there. My physical fitness depended mostly on stumbling out of my car and praying whoever was running away from me fell before I was completely out of breath. On the other hand, Mal's body could take a couple of fit and ambitious women several hours to properly explore. Sigh. I don't mean that Ranger wasn't totally worth it, but if all you eat are Boston Cream doughnuts, you will never know how good eclairs are or flan or even rice pudding. What about cheesecake? Life just isn't complete without cheesecake.

Just like magic, my ears turned red, and I knew I was breathing funny. Crap. Have you ever noticed that that seems to happen when you don't want anyone to pay attention to you? And the more you don't want to be noticed, the more noticed you are?

"Is it time to play 'Never have I Ever'?" Lula asked. "Cause I think I have some really interesting questions for you in particular, madam." She stared right at me. Perfect. Games with small children, sure. Games in bed, maybe. Games with the girls, unlikely. This particular game, not so much.

Crappity, crap, crap.

Instead of opening my mouth to invite even more potential humiliation, I walked over to the TV screen and squinted.

"Is there any way you can blow Bobby up?" Ok, so that sounded completely wrong, but Mary Lou got the idea. Bobby Brown's succulent muscles better filled the screen. Lula fanned her face. Connie sighed. Mary Lou had another handful of chips.

"What's this?" I asked. I pointed to a little rectangular something on Bobby's sternum. "It looks like Mal's."

"All the more reason to offer to set up a first-aid booth at Rangeman," Connie said. "We would be able to have them pay us a token, and we could kiss any and all boo-boos better. We could donate the money to charity."

Right. Charity.

"Damn," Connie said. "Az has one, too. Just look at his bicep." She pointed out yet another small rectangle on yet another man.

"Did they all do something at the gym we should have gotten pictures of?"

Probably. They were hardcore into hand to hand action and seemed to constantly being covered in arnica, Begay, and bandages. And that was when they were being careful. Bobby learned how to do stitches when he was a corpsman, and little doubt, he had stitched more than one of them back together at the end of a long shift.

Connie moved as close as she could to the screen, put on her reading glasses, and sighed. "There's something under that bandage." If she hadn't become breathless, it wouldn't have bothered me.

"Step away from the TV. Both of you," Mary Lou said. She popped a piece of Havarti cheese in her mouth and chased it with a jigger of tequila. "If you break it, you bought it. Lenny didn't want to buy the extended warranty, and I only finished paying for this thing last month. Besides, it is called a scab. You know sometimes they are lumpy."

I walked away from the screen. It felt like it was a walk of shame, but it wasn't. It was verification and validation. Validation because I had a similar lump under the bandage on my ribcage.

I knew exactly what it was. A handcuff key. A plastic handcuff key.

I moved my hand over my matching bandage.

"It's his handcuff key." I really should have kept my mouth shut. "Probably a spare."

"And you know this exactly why?" Connie asked. "You keep a handcuff key on your keyring."

I casually sauntered back to the dinette, selected a couple of blocks of cheese, stuffed them both in my mouth, and knew eventually I'd have to tell them at least a little about my handcuff experience.

"Well," I said. "Do we have anything not tequila to drink tonight?"

"I got juice boxes for the kids or milk," Mary Lou said.

Lula glared at me. Lula glared at me a lot. She knew more often when I was trying to obfuscate than the others did. Streetwise and able to read Body English, that was Lula. "Talk," she said. If she hadn't been tapping her toes, I might have wanted to answer just a little bit.

"Well," I said again. Mistress of Eloquence. Princess of Prescience. Duchess of Directness. Nope. Not one of these titles actually fitted me. Queen of Denial was a title I was worthy of until I honestly answered this question truthfully. I looked Connie squarely in the nose and asked, "Do you remember when you talked Vinnie into hiring me?"

Connie nodded. Lula gave a tight little nod; it wasn't a great time in her life. I knew Mary Lou knew when I got hired because I'd tried to sell her my sofa the week before.

"So," I said, "can I have one of those juice boxes?"

"After you tell us the story," Mary Lou said. "And if it's good, you can have two."

"Anyway," I said. I looked around the room hoping for some way to disappear into the floor. Nope. Not a lot of help there. "I was trying to capture Morelli."

The room nodded in agreement. Vinnie had given me Morelli as a skip because there was pretty much no one else to do it, and it wouldn't cost him anything if I didn't bring Morelli in. I had found and lost Morelli enough times to write a book about it.

"Like I said." I took a deep breath. "I had more or less taken Morelli's vehicle because there had been issues with the car I had attempted to drive." It wasn't cool. It wasn't dependable. Did I mention it wasn't cool?

I was greeted with more nods. "Get to the point," Connie said.

"I took his distributor cap so if he found his Jeep, he wouldn't be able to drive it."

Connie started wiggling her fingers at me indicating I should continue.

"And," I took a swig straight out of the tequila bottle, "I was home, dirty, tired, and needed a shower."

Mary Lou gave me a smile encouraging me to continue. "So?"

I belched. Tequila wasn't my normal adult beverage, I was more of a wine in the box kind of girl. Time to work on my endurance, I guess.

"So, I took a shower." That wasn't that hard, was it? I shivered. It wasn't one of my better memories.

"And," Lula said. "We've all of us taken a shower before. What's the big deal?"

"Well, I had just gotten all lathered up and was letting the conditioner do it's a thing, you know?" Everyone nodded. "Just when I was about to rinse off, this hand reached through the shower curtain, turned off the water, and then pulled the curtain off the rod."

"Who broke in?" Lula asked.

"Ooh, I bet it was Ranger," Connie said. "He'd make an entrance like that. You met him by that point, right?"

Oh, yeah. I'd met him. Done plenty of drooling about him. Had planned to run into him soon in something that was more attractive than one of my old work suits. Yeah. I'd met him. Ranger's entrances tended to be very quiet in the middle of the night and usually ended up with him either on or in my bed.

"Nope. It was Morelli. He was pretty pissed off," I said. Mary Lou started to hand me a juice box as my reward. Lula stopped her hand from extending me my well-earned offering.

"She ain't done yet." Lula took the juice box, plunged the straw into it, and slurped. "These aren't as good as I remembered them."

I shot her the evil eye. First, she'd told them it wasn't all over, even though they could have figured it out for themselves. Second, I wanted to know what flavor purple really was.

"What happened?" xxx asked.

"After he scared the shit out of me, he handcuffed me to the curtain rod so I couldn't fight with him or get in his way while he looked for the distributor cap."

Connie fanned herself. "Where'd he get the cuffs?"

Morelli had been a cop; little doubt, he owned more than one pair, and it wasn't like you couldn't find a pair if you knew how to shop.

"I hope those were real cop cuffs. The pink fuzzy ones are itchy after the first two or three hours. I hate it when I get a rash from those cheap-ass things. I mean, if you're going to spend money on cuffs, you shouldn't have to get rid of a rash afterward. Unless you're going to charge more for that."

We all looked at Lula. She was a font of information. Sometimes she shared too much at all the wrong times. "What?" she said. "I'm just saying some things are worth a premium."

After everyone took a deep breath and swiveled their heads back in my direction,

"They were regulation," I said. "I know because they were mine, I just bought them that afternoon with Ranger."

"Oooh. Did he try them out on your first?" Connie asked.

"Did he help you select a durable pair or a fun pair?" Mary Lou asked.

"Was it fun? If it wasn't fun, you weren't doing it right." Lula said.

"Yes, yes, he did put them on me at the store," I said. He told me that if I were going to ever handcuff someone, I should know how it felt and just how tight I could make them without hurting the other guy. Let me give you a hint; once they get tight, they don't get loose on their own. "And I didn't know how to get out of them by myself," I remembered how hard Ranger had laughed about that. I don't remember which of us got the handcuff keys, probably Ranger since he didn't think I'd actually bring Morelli in.

"Get back to the main event," Connie said. "You got handcuffed to the curtain rod, and then what happened?"

"You mean after Morelli took my towel? Or after he turned over my apartment looking for the distributor cap? Or when –" I would have gone on, but my face had turned red from both anger and embarrassment. It wasn't one of my better memories of either Morelli or Ranger. Besides, none of them had given up any of their own handcuff stories. Little doubt, at least Lula had a few.

"How'd you get out of it? Did Morelli come back to free you?" Mary Lou asked.

"Fortunately for me, he'd left my phone within reach, sort of. It was well after midnight, and I didn't want to call my dad, and the only person I knew would likely be able to uncuff me was Ranger."

Everyone sucked in a breath. I think they were all having their own x-rated daydreams of Ranger and their own handcuffs. Probably they were closer to target than they might have thought.

"Obviously, he freed you. But did anything else happen?" Mary Lou asked. "We are all adults here; you can tell us."

"She damned well better tell us," Lula said. "I knew he'd seen more than either one of you admitted for a long time."

I nodded to the bottle of tequila, and magically my shot glass was filled. Someone handed me the cheeseboard. What I really wanted was a complete margarita, some privacy, and, well, I wasn't quite sure what else. Maybe some time alone to lick my wounds or lick part of Ranger. I had only been allowed to cuff him twice, and it had been months ago.

The shot was knocked back a little too quickly and left me spluttering. Lula slapped me on the back a little too hard. It bought me about a minute before I had to continue.

"You know how Ranger's magic, right?" I asked the group. Each woman nodded in turn. Mary Lou had only heard stories about the magic of Ranger, but she was very much aware. "So that means that you know his idea of a good time is to pick locks quickly and easily." More nods from the group. "Now put one and one together, and what do you get?"

The whole group swooned. I think they were all going to want some private time tonight. Well, Lenny might get attacked when he got home, but I wasn't responsible for what happened between a consensual couple.

"Get to the point," Mary Lou said. She sounded kind of breathy. Probably pasting Lenny's face over what she'd seen of Ranger's body. Yeah, he was going to have a great time when he got home.

"Ok. The point is, Ranger picked my lock and thought he was going to find a dark apartment with flowers and candles with me spread eagle on the bed waiting for him. Instead, he walked into a mostly empty apartment that had been completely trashed and me mostly wrapped in a shower curtain with shampoo drying in my hair."

"Bet he was disappointed," Connie said.

"Surprised, yes. Disappointed, probably not," I said. He and I had only just met, and he scared the living shit out of me. I wouldn't have had the courage to do that back then. I might have the courage now, but it would take additional adult libations and a better lock on the door for me to consider it. If Ranger just needed to puff his breath on the lock to open the door and I wanted to keep this private, definitely I wanted better locks.

"Did he make a move on you?" Mary Lou asked. "I bet he did."

"Actually, he didn't. He was impressed that I had the nerve to remove the distributor cap and that I hadn't hidden it in my apartment."

"Where was it?"

"I left it in a planter in front of the building and covered it with some leaves so it wouldn't show up."

"And?" Lula asked. She took a fistful of mixed nuts and started to separate them into her favorites. I'd seen her do this several times and knew that she'd be returning the almonds back to the bowl.

"And he uncuffed me. Told me that I should have spare handcuff keys around the apartment in case it happened again. He handed me a spare key from his keyring and left."

"That's a disappointment." Mary Lou said. "I mean, he didn't do anything?"

"He was a gentleman," I said. Besides, later he told me he only did consensual, and I wouldn't have been consenting to a damn thing that night. Not that I didn't consent a lot in the future, but that's another story.

Thanks for bearing with me ... the original authors will be posted next week ... we always appreciate that you have taken the time to read and review! Kisses to all from Alf and Kevan