SEATTLE – Mary Kay Letourneau visited the courthouse on her first day of freedom to register as a sex offender even as the former sixth-grade student she was convicted of raping sought to reunite with her. Within hours after Letourneau completed her 7½-year prison term for raping Vili Fualaau when he was 12, the young man filed a Superior Court motion seeking to vacate a no-contact order that bars them from seeing each other.

Fualaau, now 21, and Letourneau, 42, have two children together.

He told NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday that he’s very excited to see her.

“I want to see who she is and if she’s still the same person that I fell in love with. And I want to see if she feels the same way for me,” Fualaau said.

He said he hopes to decide by the end of the month whether their relationship has a future. Dating women his own age hasn’t made him happy, Fualaau said.

“Every girl or woman that I’ve gone out with, I’ve always compared Mary to them,” he said. “I wanted to bond with them on many different levels. And I couldn’t do that with any other girl, because I constantly thought about Mary.”

Fualaau said in Wednesday’s motion that he’s old enough now to pick his own friends.

Fualaau “does not fear Mary K. Letourneau,” the document said. The filing noted there was “no allegation of forcible compulsion” in the case and that the sole basis for criminal charges was Fualaau’s age.

The King County prosecutor’s office is reviewing the request.

Letourneau “has a personal need to get back together with him to prove to the world this is a love story and not a crime story,” said Gregg Olsen, who wrote a book about the case.

“Part of Mary Letourneau will never let go of this love.”

The sentencing order that bars contact between Letourneau and Fualaau allows Letourneau to have contact with their daughters, now 6 and 7.

As required, Letourneau registered late Wednesday afternoon at the King County Courthouse as a level-two sex offender, defined as one likely to reoffend, sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. John Urquhart said.

Released from a state women’s prison early Wednesday, she reportedly will be living with an older couple in their home in the Boulevard Park neighborhood of King County, south of Seattle. Media crews tracked her to the house.

Authorities will notify her neighbors that a sex offender is living in the area.

So far, Letourneau has kept a low profile. She slipped out of prison quietly and ducked in and out of the courthouse unobtrusively.

Attorneys for Letourneau and Fualaau did not return repeated calls from The Associated Press. Fualaau’s Seattle-area telephone number is unlisted.

Letourneau was a 34-year-old elementary school teacher in suburban Des Moines, an unhappily married mother of four, when she began having sex with Fualaau in 1996.

“We had sex in the gym, we had sex in the girl’s bathroom and we had sex in her classroom,” Fualaau testified at a 2002 civil trial in which he unsuccessfully sought damages from the school district and local police.

When Letourneau was arrested in 1997, she was already pregnant with their first child. A judge sentenced her to six months in jail for second-degree child rape, and ordered her to stay away from the boy.

A month after she was released, Letourneau was caught having sex with Fualaau in her car. She was sent to prison for 7½ years, and gave birth to Fualaau’s second child behind bars.

“Nothing could have kept the two of them apart,” Seattle attorney Anne Bremner told the AP this week before Letourneau’s release.

“She’s always said this love is eternal and endless, and I think she stands by that.”

The two women became friends in 2002, when Bremner defended the Des Moines Police Department against the claim from Fualaau and his mother.

Fualaau, an unemployed high school dropout working on his GED, told People magazine recently that he’d like to reunite with his former teacher, but wants to move slowly.

“I don’t know what my feelings are right now,” Fualaau told KING-TV in Seattle on Tuesday, acknowledging he was “kind of nervous.”

“But I know that I do love her,” he said.

While at the state prison for women near Gig Harbor, Letourneau sang in a choir and recorded books for the blind – and served time in solitary for attempting to contact Fualaau.

Her two daughters have been raised by his mother. They visited Letourneau in prison about twice a month.

Her four older children, who live in Alaska with her ex-husband, visited a few times a year.