“We were intimate on many levels,” Crawford, 58, claimed to Craig Melvin on the Today show on Thursday, November 7. “And all I can say is that it was very deep, and we were very connected.”
Crawford said she first met Houston in New Jersey ahead of the singer’s 17th birthday. They quickly became friends and eventually lovers.
“Our friendship was a deep friendship,” she recalled. “In the early part of that friendship, it was physical.”
The pair were intimate shortly after they shared their first kiss. They spent the night at the home of a friend.
“We talked and talked,” writes Crawford. “And then all of a sudden, we were face to face. The first kiss was long and slow, like honey. As we eased out of it, my nerves shot up and my heart beat furiously. Something was happening between us.”
“At the apartment we took off our clothes, and for the first time, we touched each other,” she writes. “Caressing her and loving her felt like a dream.”
Crawford was 19 and the singer was about to turn 17, and they were both counselors at a summer camp in East Orange, New Jersey.
“We wanted to be together and it was just us,” Crawford tells PEOPLE.
“The physical part of our friendship happened along the way and it was just as beautiful,” she says. “We were on a journey together and and we were connected.”
They shared their first kiss together that summer when Whitney invited Robyn over to her house.
Crawford is doing media appearances ahead of the debut of her new memoir, “A Song For You: My Life with Whitney Houston,” on Nov. 12.
Crawford added that Houston’s family — especially her mom, Cissy Houston — told them “it wasn’t natural for two women to be that close.”
“But we were that close,” Crawford wrote.
Original articles appeared on US Weekly and PEOPLE.