He walked out of the elevator and into my life. His legs went on forever in those designer jeans. The grin, the hair, the body — sigh, the body.

I had answered his ad to rent his storage space. Our meeting should have taken five minutes. Instead, we spent the next eight hours together. Actually, we spent the next eight months together.

This was in Toronto, where I am a writer and journalist. He was a medical student from Iran. He was Muslim, and he was much younger than me, outrageously so, almost the age difference between Hugh Hefner and his girlfriends, with me as Hugh. I was in my late 50s, and he was in his early 20s. My husband had died long before; my two sons were grown.

I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he saw me as a friend, a supporter. Maybe he wanted money.

In any case, I was interested in him. I wondered: How can I turn this into something romantic? I was usually good at that kind of thing. But he said that he really respected me — a bad start, not the way I wanted it to go.

He asked if I wanted to work out with him, and I said yes, not mentioning that the last and only time I had worked out was in 1992. We went to the gym, where he lifted weights while I lay on a bench watching him as he rippled.