Dear Katie,

I have a confession to make, right off the bat: this isn’t a love letter. It’s a lust letter. A letter I’ve written to you a hundred ways a hundred times or more. A letter I recite to myself when your words crawl out of the screen and in through my mouth. A letter I’ve seen imprinted on my retinas, overlaying your images, offered up like that very first shaky poem I handed him in our high-school stairwell.

This is a letter I’ve thought and never typed, my hands hovering over the keyboard with the fear and anticipation of first touching a lover’s bare flesh. This is a letter about the way I feel when I read the things you leave out for me to find, though not for me alone. It’s a letter about how watching you be so very you—in your beauty and imperfection and fierce, stubborn vulnerability and overwhelming sensuality and loveable, dorky professionalism and private honesty—pushes me to be so very me. To live and love and laugh and cry and fuck and fuck up and care and forgive, especially myself.

This is a letter to you about the way your words climb under my skin and the way they arouse me. When you talk dirty to me I can feel my thighs clench, ever so slightly. My lips part as your words come closer and my tongue runs along the bottom edge of my upper teeth. When you are lonely and sad I want to hold your cheek to the space between my breasts, and stroke your hair, and tell you that not everything will be okay, but some things will. I want to lay you down in a bed with too many pillows and trace my fingers over your skin until you call me filthy names I’ve never even thought of. I want to sit very still and quiet in that late afternoon light while we both pretend we are very interested in our books, waiting to steal longing glances in the moments when I can’t feel your eyes running over me.

I want to dance with you. In that moving-everything-just-when-it-desires-to-be-moved way, and in that breathing-close-by-your-sweaty-neck way, and in that complete-abandonment-of-the-idea-of-the-eyes-of-others way too. I want to lick you. Your calves and your cunt and the curls at the nape of your neck. That is, if you want me to lick you. Or maybe you’d rather that we just tell each other the things we don’t want to tell anybody, and cry and laugh and fall asleep on the floor by the couch. Or maybe we’ll wait until it’s too hot, and sit eating popsicles on the corner, naming every cat that walks into view. I don’t mind.

This is a letter about how I am grateful but never knew how to tell you, because gratitude was wrapped up in other feelings and none of them made sense for a stranger. This is a letter about the way you punctuate, and the way you ponder, and the way you pose. This is a letter about the hot, wet feeling in my groin and the tight, close feeling in my chest, and the way my lip curls and my head nods, Yes.

Katie, this is my confession to you. This is a lust letter. This is long-distance, long-time, lusting and longing and maybe loving too.

Katie West, I lust you.