Kenna James: I love Anal Gaping!

Influencing is getting to be a grind, and not the good kind. Kenna wants an experience that will make sparks, and she can’t have that without some burning hot friction.

The algorithm was hungry again.

Kenna stared at her phone, at the dismal engagement numbers on her latest post—a perfectly curated flat lay of a matcha latte, a crystal necklace, and a paperback with the spine carefully cracked to look “well-loved” but not actually read. Twenty-seven likes. Three comments, two of which were from bots selling weight loss tea. Her agent had called it a “soft performance.” Kenna called it what it was: a slow, humiliating death by irrelevance.

She tossed the phone onto her velvet tufted headboard and stared at the ceiling of her overpriced Los Angeles apartment. Outside, the sun was doing its predictable Southern California thing, blazing and perfect, and Kenna wanted to scream. Another day of content creation stretched before her—another day of pretending her life was aspirational and effortless, another day of chasing trends that would be obsolete by tomorrow, another day of smiling at the camera until her cheeks ached.

“I can’t,” she whispered to the empty room. “I literally cannot.”

Her therapist would say this was a sign of burnout. Her agent would say this was a sign she needed to post more Reels. Her mother would say this was a sign she should have gone to law school like originally planned. But Kenna knew what it really was: she was bored. Bored of the grind, bored of the performance, bored of the endless cycle of content creation that left her feeling emptier with every post.

She needed something real. Something messy. Something that would make her feel alive again.

That’s how she ended up at the workshop.

It was hidden in an industrial part of the city, the kind of neighborhood where you didn’t go after dark unless you knew exactly where you were going. The building had no sign, just a number painted in faded black on the corrugated metal door. Kenna had found it through a friend of a friend, someone who knew someone who ran an underground welding class for people who wanted to “make things with their hands and their whole hearts,” whatever that meant.

She’d worn old jeans and a band t-shirt, no makeup, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. No one here would recognize her, and that was exactly the point.

The door opened, and heat washed over her—industrial heat, the kind that came from fire and metal and machines doing what they were built to do. Inside, a dozen people stood at workbenches, wearing protective gear and holding torches that spat blue flame. Sparks flew in arcs of gold and white, showering the concrete floor like tiny stars. The sound was overwhelming—hissing, clanging, the low hum of ventilation systems working overtime.

And at the center of it all, there was him.

The instructor was tall, broad-shouldered, with forearms that looked like they’d been sculpted from the same metal his students worked with. He wore a leather apron over a plain white t-shirt, the sleeves rolled up to expose those arms, and safety glasses pushed up into dark, messy hair. He moved between workbenches with the easy confidence of someone who’d been doing this since before Kenna was born, adjusting a torch here, offering quiet guidance there.

Then he looked up and saw her.

Even across the room, even through the haze of sparks and heat, his eyes found hers. He didn’t smile. He just looked, and in that look was something that made Kenna’s carefully curated world tilt slightly on its axis.

“You must be the new one,” he said when she reached him. His voice was low, rough, the kind of voice that belonged in this space. “You ever welded before?”

“No,” she admitted. “I’ve never done anything like this. I just… I needed something different.”

Something flickered in his eyes—amusement, maybe, or recognition. “Different. Yeah, I know that feeling.” He handed her a helmet. “Put this on. We’re starting you with the basics.”

His name was Cole. He’d been welding since he was sixteen, working in his father’s shop, learning to bend metal to his will. Now he ran this space, teaching classes to anyone who wanted to learn, keeping the trade alive one student at a time. He didn’t know what an influencer was, didn’t care about follower counts or engagement rates. When Kenna tried to explain her job, he just shook his head and said, “So you take pictures of stuff and people look at them?”

“Basically.”

“Huh.” He handed her a piece of scrap metal. “Well, here, you’re gonna make stuff now. Real stuff. Stuff you can hold.”

The first hour was a disaster. Kenna couldn’t get the torch to light properly, couldn’t control the flame, couldn’t do anything right. Her first attempt at a bead weld looked like a drunk caterpillar had crawled across the metal and died. She was sweating, frustrated, covered in a fine layer of grime that would have horrified her aesthetician.

But then Cole came up behind her.

“Your grip’s too tight,” he said, his voice close to her ear. “You’re fighting the torch. Let it breathe.”

His hands covered hers, adjusting her grip, guiding her movements. His chest was warm against her back, his arms strong and sure as he helped her guide the flame. The sparks flew—beautiful, dangerous, alive—and for the first time in months, Kenna felt something real.

“There,” he murmured, stepping back. “That’s it. That’s what you’re supposed to feel.”

She looked at the metal. The weld was still ugly, still amateur, but there was something there—a line of connection, of heat transformed into substance. She’d made that. Her hands, her effort, her focus. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t curated. It was real.

“I felt it,” she said, and her voice came out strange, almost awed. “I actually felt it.”

Cole smiled then—the first real smile she’d seen from him—and something in Kenna’s chest shifted. “That’s the thing about fire,” he said. “You can’t fake it. You can’t influence it. You just have to meet it with everything you’ve got, or it’ll burn you.”

She came back the next night. And the next. And the next.

The welding got better—slowly, painfully, beautifully better. But that wasn’t why she kept coming back. She kept coming back for the way Cole looked at her when she finally got it right. For the way his rough, calloused hands felt when they guided hers. For the sparks that flew between them, literal and metaphorical, until she couldn’t tell where the welding ended and something else began.

“You know I have a whole life out there,” she said one night, gesturing vaguely toward the door, toward the city full of followers and brands and endless content. “A whole world that doesn’t know this place exists.”

Cole was sharpening something at his workbench, not looking at her. “And?”

“And I don’t care. When I’m in here, that world doesn’t exist. It’s just me and the fire and—” She stopped.

He looked up. “And?”

Kenna crossed the space between them, pulled the tool from his hands, set it aside. Then she kissed him, hard and hungry and real, the way she’d been wanting to since that first night. He tasted like metal and sweat and something deeper, something that made her knees weak.

When they finally broke apart, his hands were in her hair, her back against the workbench, sparks still flying somewhere behind them.

“I’m not your type,” he said, but his voice was rough, affected.

“How do you know what my type is?”

He laughed—low and surprised, like he hadn’t expected to. “Fair point. But I’m not gonna be in your Instagram stories. I’m not gonna pose with your products or smile for your followers.”

“Good.” She kissed him again. “I don’t want you there. I want you here. In the fire. In the friction. In all of this.”

Outside, the algorithm was still hungry. The engagement numbers were still dropping. The grind was still grinding. But inside this warehouse, with sparks flying and metal bending and Cole’s hands on her skin, Kenna had finally found what she’d been looking for.

Something real. Something messy. Something that burned.