‘You too,’ I said, silently hoping he’d have a shit name – something stupidly-spelled like Jaysin or Dezzmond or a duff one like Keith, so to diminish his perfection even slightly. But he didn’t.

He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘Rafael.’

‘Rafael,’ I said, ignoring the throb in my chest. Oh my God. He was the hottest Ninja Turtle. It had to be, didn’t it? That had to be a sign. Days before, I’d had the conversation with Jayde and Ryan about our cartoon shag-wishes, and now here he was – a living breathing Shag Wish. He waited for me to say my name but I didn’t – I was too caught up with the warmth of his hand and the fact he was named after the hot turtle.

A shiny-cheeked young woman in an orange playsuit – Fun Times at Guantánamo – made a beeline for him, linking his arm with hers.

‘Shame we couldn’t have hung out,’ he said as he walked away.

I looked up at the TV screen. ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ I smiled. I don’t know if he heard but he smiled too.

And he left me, there alone, with nothing but the puddle of jizz to keep me company. No change there.

It could have been the parasite in me, looking for a host, but watching him walk away without a second look, it hurt. Reality shook me wide awake. I was on my own again. And I didn’t like it one little bit.

Anyway, another bumpy flight, a crowded shuttle bus and a taxi ride later, and I arrived as instructed at Hacienda Santuario – sweating like a pre-war Prince Andrew. The place sat at the end of Camino Aguacate, a steep dirt track nestled in the hills above the resort city of Rocas Calientes, overlooking a golden stretch of coast.

Arturo, my cabbie, who had greeted me at the airport with a torn-off square of cardboard and a crudely-drawn flower on it, had informed me the name translated as ‘Hot Rocks’ and the deeper into the hills we went, the more accurate that became. Grey boulders littered a scorching hot desert of ferocious-looking thorn bushes. There wasn’t another house, car or person on the horizon the whole drive up from the coastal highway. Just dead dogs. I counted four on that one road.

‘Why all the dead dogs?’ I asked him, who spoke way better English than I did Spanish.

He chuckled and his dimples deepened. ‘There are many stray dogs in Mexico. They escape, they fuck, they produce more dogs. It’s a problem.’

One of the dogs I noted looked like Tink – a little brown Chihuahua with crazy-big ears and a little black nose. She even had a white patch on her big belly like Tink. I couldn’t look at her for long.