I'd be sitting in the red lawn chair, spitting pits into a white paper napkin with a film of sweat across my lip and smoked pork smell slipping across the fence and settling in the fresh-mowed grass.
And you would take my hand with a coppertoned ­finesse as I fluttered my lashes in old glamour ­fashion and there'd be a balmy Georgia breeze and the world would be beautiful.
And there would be fireflies, flickering gems in waxy mint twilight and your skin would be sure, tough, ­calloused and worn, palms and fingertips stained red from the cherries.
Then I'd imagine that old Dodge Ram with the big ­sagging bumper and the trunk that smelled like fresh gasoline and we'd lie across the metal in the middle of the day just to feel the heat spread through our clothes, just to feel alive.
I'd remind you of it and you'd smile all crooked with a shallow dimple like the curling caves in the hills.
Your tabby cat would jump into your lap, a thick hearty purr, and then with a buzz, we'd both be in love.
After that it'd be just us.
We would run away straight for the desert and our skin would dry and our lips would chap and I'd get a nosebleed once in a while that would collect warm and oily in the back of my throat.
We'd sip blackened coffee in cheap little diners and sleep in the back of that old Dodge Ram with your arm on my shoulder and dreaming of thunder.
Your stubble would sprout from that strong darkened jaw and we'd drive through cornfields so lush and so gold that it was like the sun had fallen hard and shattered across the earth, forgetting some of its pieces before it rose again.
And then it would end.
Surrounded by red quilted linen and blue flowered wallpaper, I'd scream I was sick of you.
You weren't the same now, apparently, and I would keep yelling and you would rip the toothbrush from your mouth and yell right back with foam spewing from your lips like the first snowfall of autumn that freckles the leaves till they melt off the stems.
We'd glare at each other as your feelings shriveled like Florida raisins and I'd ­remember that night we fell in love with sour-sweet cherry taste against my gums and how I knew there would be no one else for me.
But I wouldn't let myself get any farther into this dark inky mess that was based on hot afternoons and flat Coke and vanilla stamps and poems with run-on ­sentences that would end with clichés as sticky as sun-warmed sap that bubbles at the rings of a fresh-cut oak but it's too late.
I'm yours.