As far as projects go, this one was kind of strange. On the surface, it was normal enough. A client contacted the company I work for to schedule an update to their security system. We do projects like that all the time.

This project was different in that they requested that all on-site work be done by a single individual. Normally, we would send out an analyst to develop a plan, then a project manager to review the plan, and eventually a small team of technicians to do the physical installation. Because I was qualified to do all of those tasks, the project landed on my desk.

Once on site, the client's request started to make sense. The client was something of an art collector, specializing in antiquities. Many of their pieces were on loan to museums, and they often opened their doors to academia, but the intrinsic value of the collection made security a high priority. Part of maintaining their security included limiting the number of people who knew details of the security system.

It had been a while since I had worked my way up the ladder from installation tech to engineer to project manager, and I found that I enjoyed the chance to go back and prove I still had some of those skills. The project went well, with the exception of one small detail.

One of the upgrades that we added was a system to monitor every door and every drawer of every cabinet in their storage vault. There was one particular cabinet that the curator wanted me to make provisions for, but he strongly stressed that I was never to open that cabinet. He wanted me to make provisions to monitor the doors, but he insisted that he would be the one to install the new hardware.

Perhaps I should have consulted with him first, but my idea of 'make provisions' was to install all of the necessary wiring as far as an access panel above the cabinet, leaving just the switch mounting to him. Electrically, all he would need to do was connect a plug.

I was standing on a short ladder in front of the cabinet and finishing up the wiring when he arrived with a worried look on his face.

"How long have you been standing there?" he demanded in a worried tone.

"Not long, maybe five minutes?" I replied, questioning his worry.

He seemed to deflate for a moment, and he quietly stated, "I should have been more clear on my instructions. I guess it's too late now. The artifact inside that cabinet seems to have an affect on people who get too near to it, and my intent was that you avoid it entirely. You might as well stay and install the hardware, because what's done is done. You're welcome or I'm sorry, depending on how it goes."

"You're sorry?" I questioned.

"We'll have to see if the effect is good or bad," he stated. "Why don't you take a quick break while I retrieve the hardware you gave me from my office, and we'll see how it goes."

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and quickly scurried away.

I sighed, debated for a moment whether or not to open the cabinet to see what he was talking about, and then decided not to.

One of the house rules for their site was that no food or beverages besides water were allowed in the building. I had snacks and a soft drink in a cooler in my truck outside the service entrance, so I headed outside to take a short break. I had just sat down to enjoy sliced vegetable sticks and a soda when a woman walked up to me with a questioning look on her face.

"Do you work here?" she asked.

"Just as a contractor," I stated. "If you need to talk to an employee, you'll need to go around to the main entrance out front."

"I guess," she said with a frown. She pondered for a moment, and then stated, "I don't think they would help me."

In spite of my own caution, I asked, "You need help?"

She studied me for a moment, trying to decide if she could trust me or not.

"I've been here before, inside," she stated. "It was ten years ago. My parents were invited to some event in the gallery, and they brought me along. My mother asked the curator about some specific type of clay tablets, and he invited her to examine something in their archives.

"I probably shouldn't have snuck after them, but I was bored, and I did. I hid behind a shelf and watched while he showed my mother some things, and then I followed as they started to return to the gallery. Suddenly, my mother stopped in front of an oddly fancy looking cabinet and said something about how it felt different. The curator tried to stop her, but she opened the cabinet, and they both froze.

"I didn't quite understand what happened next. The curator tried to reach for the cabinet door, but he ended up behind my mother, and their bodies collided. An odd light flashed out of the cabinet, and then suddenly the two of them were stripping naked. I was only sixteen, and I got quite the education as I watched them.

"When it was over, they both seemed so embarrassed. As they cleaned up, I snuck back to the reception, and I have never told anyone what I saw that night. The sad/funny thing is that my mother always wanted another child, but shortly after I was born, my father had had an accident that left him impotent. Things were tense at home for a while, but my father loves my little brother as much as my mother does.

"The thing is, I never saw what it was, the thing in the cabinet, but I have been dreaming about it ever since. And lately, the dreams have gotten stronger and stronger, and I simply have to see what it is. Somehow, I don't think the receptionist will let me in, no matter what pretense I try to make up."

As she told her story, my heart felt her pain and her need, and I felt sorry for her. In spite of that, there was no chance that I was going to let her into the building. Even if I escorted her, and never let her out of my sight, letting her in was a huge breach of security, and if loss of honor wasn't enough, I would also lose my job. As she finished, I opened my mouth to tell her exactly that.

"A quick look, no pictures, and promise you won't touch a thing," I heard myself say.

With a hugely hopeful look, she begged, "I have my sketch pad. Give me three minutes to make a quick drawing."

I opened my mouth to completely withdraw the ill-fated offer, but I heard myself say, "No more than three minutes, and then out the door." As I spoke, I used a swipe card and a keypad to open the service door.

My feet seemed to have a mind of their own, and I knew exactly which cabinet she was talking about. As we approached the cabinet that the curator had warned me away from, she smiled and pointed to a narrow corridor between shelves.

"I was hiding right there," she offered, and then without slowing down, she stepped over to the cabinet and pulled the double doors open. She gasped as she stared, and she barely noticed that my feet carried me forward to stand tantalizingly close behind her.

There are no words to adequately describe what I saw in the cabinet. I think it was smaller than a thimble, but as large as an elephant. I'm sure it was as soft as a down feather, but carved from stone. It was rainbow hued, all of one color that was neither red nor blue nor green. All I can say is that it glowed.

"It's beautiful," she gasped as she stood and stared. Suddenly, she shook herself, and she asked, "Is it hot in here? Where's my sketch pad?"

Somehow, as she bent to pull out her notebook, her blouse fluttered to the floor. When she stood again, she seemed to lose her balance for a moment, and her body fell back against mine.

"I've got you," I heard myself offer as I steadied her.

"Mmmm," she replied as she put pencil to paper. At the same time, she tipped her head and lowered her shoulder as if offering her neck to my lips. The light from the object tugged at me, and my lips touched her flesh.

"Mmmm, just like my dream, only I could never turn to see what you looked like," she purred. "Don't stop. That feels good."

In my mind, I knew that I should have stopped, and I knew that I shouldn't have let her in in the first place. I wrestled with myself for a long moment, and I managed to lift my lips from the heat of her neck. Apparently, I was actually losing my internal battle, because I only stopped long enough to toss my shirt to the floor so that we could both enjoy the heat of her back pressed against my bare chest.

"What? No!" she exclaimed, and for a moment I hoped that she had come to her senses and would make me stop. Instead of stopping me, she turned in my arms to show me the sketch she had made.

The picture she had made was amazing in its details, but had nothing to do with the thing in the cabinet. It showed a young woman on her knees on the floor, her face buried in her hands as she cried. A tall young man stood over her, a look of scorn turning his face ugly.

"I don't understand," she pondered. "I mean, that's my ex-husband Michael, berating me for not being able to conceive his child. His mother was so insistent that he give her a grandchild, and the pressure was too much for both of us. Why did I draw that? Give me a minute more? I have to try again."

"A minute more," I heard myself agree, when I knew we were running out of time.

I don't quite know how to describe what happened next. She clearly closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and as she let it out, she put pencil to paper and started drawing again. At the same time, my body pressed up tightly behind hers, and all of our clothes were on the floor. Her body flexed against mine, inviting my hands to caress the warm firmness of her skin on her hips, her stomach, her ribs, and her breasts. At the same time, my lips tasted her neck and her shoulder, and she purred in pleasure.

"What the..." she gasped, and we both looked down at the image she had created.

There were two people in the drawing, who were clearly stylized versions of her and me. The man was standing behind the woman, with his hands pulling on her hips, and his knees bent to push forward and up. The woman had her hands out in front of her, perhaps leaning on a cabinet, and her back was arched way up and back to let her partner push deep inside her as she came.

She quietly started to laugh. "At sixteen, I had no idea that people could fuck in any position except man on top, woman on her back. Watching my mother arch her back like that made it very clear how much she was enjoying herself. I know my time is up, but I have to try again."

"Yes, you do," I affirmed.

As she put pencil to paper for the final time, I knew exactly what was going to happen next. My hands caught her hips and pulled. My knees bent. Her back arched. Our bodies joined as one.

I have to give her credit in this: Her body flexed and made demands, my body responded and delivered, her body shook with every thrust, and yet the lines the pencil made on the paper were straight and sure, and the couple of times that I glanced down, it was exactly what we saw in the cabinet.

Suddenly, she cried out as she threw down the pad and pencil and reached out to grab the support of the cabinet. At the same time, she arched her back in an exact match of the second sketch. As her body started to rhythmically clamp down on mine, my body responded with pulse after pulse of heat to fill her. I roared in pleasure, and she cried out to demand more.

Slowly, the pulsing stopped. Bit by bit, her back straightened, and she almost pulled away from me. As she stood and turned in my arms, her elbow knocked the cabinet doors closed, but we didn't care. We held each other tightly for much longer than we should have.

"I'm sorry," she softly murmured. "I don't know what came over me. Please don't be upset. This is my fault, not yours."

The quiet clearing of a throat startled us, but we didn't let go of each other as we opened our eyes. The curator was waiting on us, with a sad look in his eyes.

"I thought I had seen someone following us that night, but you were nowhere to be seen after things got out of hand," he stated. With a sad smile, he added, "I wouldn't have known it was you, except your mother made the same apologies to me that night as you made just now. I've always wondered why you never said anything about that night."

The woman took a deep breath and then slowly let it out.

"I tried, but somehow the words would never come out," she stated. "When my brother was born..." she offered with a shrug. "When my mother accused me of ruining my marriage, and I wanted to hurt her..." she said with another shrug.

Her eyes looked away for a moment, but then turned to race up my body as she realized that we were both standing there naked. As she tried to press her body closer to mine for protection, she asked, "So what happens now? I won't mind if you have me arrested for trespassing, but don't blame..."

She blushed and gave me an embarrassed smile. "Maybe you should tell me your name, so I can beg to make sure you don't lose your job."

Before I could answer, the curator interrupted with a quiet laugh. "Perhaps you should look at the last drawing you made for your answer. By the way, you should know that we've never been able to take a single photo or make a single drawing of that thing. We have no idea why people react to it the way that they do, but the results are almost always really tragic, or really good. Tell me what you think of your fate."

With a self-conscious smile, the woman let herself separate from me long enough to stoop and pick up the sketch pad. Her eyes were wide with wonder as she held up the final image for us to share.

The man and the woman in the image were clearly her and I. In the image, she was sitting in front of me, with my arms around her, and our heads lovingly close together. Her breasts were bare and swollen, and she was holding an infant tenderly to her breast to feed. There were rings on our joined hands that supported the baby's bottom.

"For your father's sake, your mother has asked that I not be a part of her son's life," the curator was saying. "Let me hire you as an artist working here at the institute, and I will be the best 'Honored Uncle' any child has ever had. Please?"

The woman's eyes questioned mine, and my eyes replied by teasing her for our nakedness and our embrace. She smiled and nodded at me before she looked back to the curator.

"As an employee, will I be able to bring my fiancé in to gaze in this cabinet whenever we want?" she asked. Before he could reply, she quickly added, "Before you remind me of the bad with the good, I have to say that it feels to me like if we give the artifact something it wants, the results will always be good."

The curator gave the cabinet a thoughtful look and then slowly nodded. His eyes scanned over our naked bodies, and then quietly laughed.

"Hopefully not too often," he teased. "If you visit too often, people might start to realize what a dirty old man I am, and besides, I won't be able to get any work done, sneaking away to watch while you're out here playing."

The woman, who was apparently now my fiancé, brazenly stepped out of my arms and stood nakedly in front of her new boss to shake his hand. "It's a deal," she agreed, and our fate was sealed.