BY CONNIE CASS
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON -- She loved him, nicknamed him "Handsome," thought maybe someday he would marry her.
Monica Lewinsky's version of her relationship with the president reads like the gushy diary of a starstruck 22-year-old.
Which is what she was.
Laying her love life bare for prosecutors, Ms. Lewinsky described not just sex with President Clinton but long talks about their childhoods. Shared jokes, frequent hugs, the way the president "always used to push the hair out of my face."
"I never expected to fall in love with the president. I was surprised that I did," she said.
At times, she believed that he loved her, too.
But the relationship was often frustrating, and eventually turned sour.
By her own account, Ms. Lewinsky was emotional and insecure, capable of tears and tantrums, and deeply frustrated when Clinton stopped seeing her. A few weeks after the president broke up with her, on May 24, 1997, she wrote a "peevish" letter obliquely threatening to reveal their relationship if he didn't help her get another White House job, prosecutors said in the report released Friday.
In his grand jury testimony, the president testified that he feared she would disclose their relationship if he broke it off, the report said.
In the months after their breakup, as the Paula Jones lawsuit against the president raised the possibility that Ms. Lewinsky might be asked to testify, she grew more demanding. She pressed Clinton to find her a challenging, well-paying job in New York City, the report indicates.
One Saturday last December, Ms. Lewinsky's temper caused a minor furor at a White House gate that left some Secret Service officers fearing for their jobs, the report said.
Ms. Lewinsky said she became "livid" when she arrived at the gate with parting gifts for the president, only to be told that he was with another young woman whom, the report said, Ms. Lewinsky suspected of being romantically involved with the president. Ms. Lewinsky stormed off to a pay phone to call the president's secretary and complain.
Prosecutors said secretary Betty Currie then told the Secret Service officers at the gate that Clinton was "irate" that Ms. Lewinsky was told whom he was with. Ms. Lewinsky also complained to Clinton by telephone. He told her "it was none of my business ... what he was doing."
But that was at the end.
It had all begun, she told prosecutors, shortly after her internship started in the summer of 1995. She would try to make eye contact and told her aunt "the president seemed attracted to her or interested in her or something."
Then, during the government shutdown in November, she got a chance to be alone with him in a White House office and coyly lifted the back of her jacket, revealing the top of her thong panties peeking out above her pants.
That night, in a dimly lit White House office, Ms. Lewinsky told Clinton she had a crush on him. He asked if he could kiss her, leading to their first sexual encounter.
In December, after other such encounters, "I asked him why he doesn't ask me any questions about myself, and ... is this just about sex?" The president, Ms. Lewinsky said, assured her that he cherished their time together.
At times her description of the relationship that followed sounds like two teen-agers in puppy love: They held hands, exchanged token gifts, talked on the telephone for hours, engaged in heavy petting. He called her "Sweetie" and "Baby." In a Valentine's Day ad for "Handsome" in The Washington Post, she quoted from "Romeo and Juliet."
But other details make clear this was the dalliance of an older man -- the nation's most powerful male -- with a wide-eyed intern. The 10 sexual acts she described were noticeably one-sided.
He told her the two of them were "full of fire" and she made him feel young. But one night, as they chatted after telephone sex, the president dozed off, still on the line.
Although she knew the president wanted their affair to be secret, Ms. Lewinsky told at least 11 people, including her mother and Linda Tripp, the friend who secretly tape-recorded her conversations and turned them over to prosecutors.
Ms. Lewinsky, now 25, also saved the most conclusive evidence of their trysts -- a semen-stained dress -- for almost a year and a half, even after signing an affidavit for the Jones lawsuit denying the affair. She told prosecutors that she meant to have the dress cleaned but never got around to it.
Soon after the affair began, Ms. Lewinsky began calling her psychotherapist from the White House to reel off details of their sexual encounters.
According to one of the friends Ms. Lewinsky confided in, Neysa Erbland, the president told her that "he was uncertain that he would remain married after he left the White House."
"Ms. Lewinsky thought, according to Ms. Erbland, that 'Maybe she (Lewinsky) will be his wife,"' prosecutors reported.
There is no other indication Clinton ever contemplated anything like that.
Aides who were worried that Ms. Lewinsky was hanging around the president too much arranged to transfer her from her White House job to the Pentagon in April 1996. Ms. Lewinsky considered that a demotion but said Clinton promised to bring her back right after he was re-elected in November. It didn't happen.
"I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn't wait to come back," she wrote in a letter to the president she never sent.
She poured out her heart in another unsent letter, written last October.
"Any normal person would have walked away from this and said he doesn't call me, he doesn't want to see me -- screw it. It doesn't matter," she wrote. But, "I can't let go of you, I want to be a source of pleasure and laughter and energy to you. I want to make you smile."
