Chapter 14 Skyler
Skyler
Ichanged my shirt four times.
This was insane. It was tacos.
Casual tacos at a hole-in-the-wall spot with a friend.
There was no reason to be standing in front of my closet at 11:15 a.m., cycling through options like I was preparing for a magazine shoot.
Navy henley? Too try-hard.
Gray T-shirt? Too boring.
White button-down? Way too much. This wasn’t a job interview.
I settled on a faded FSU T-shirt that I’d owned since college. It was soft, comfortable, and felt low-effort. Plus, Jacks would appreciate the Seminoles connection, former linebacker and all that.
I checked myself in the mirror one last time. My hair was doing that thing where it couldn’t decide if it wanted to cooperate or rebel. I ran my fingers through it, made it worse, then gave up. This was as good as it was going to get.
My phone buzzed on the dresser.
Jacks: Still on for noon? I can push if you need more time to recover from last night’s heroics.
Me: Heroics? That was a regular goal for me. Very casual. I barely even tried.
Jacks: Right. The slow-motion replay of you screaming like a thirteen-year-old girl who got invited to prom sold the casual vibe.
Me: I was screaming casually.
Jacks: Is that even a thing?
Me: It is now. I invented it.
Jacks: Groundbreaking. See you in a few, not-so-casual screamer.
I grinned at my phone like an idiot.
This had become a pattern. Jacks would text, I would smile, and the weird buzzing feeling in my chest would intensify. I’d stopped trying to analyze it. It was just how things were now.
The drive to Seminole Heights took about twenty minutes. The neighborhood was exactly what Jacks had promised: eclectic and a little rough around the edges, the kind of place where trendy coffee shops sat next to auto repair garages and nobody seemed to mind.
I almost drove past the restaurant.
Because it wasn’t a restaurant.
It was a bus.
A literal bus painted bright yellow and red with “TACO BUS” emblazoned across the side in letters that looked like they’d been designed by someone who survived an apocalypse on tequila and enthusiasm.
The windows had been replaced with service counters, and a hand-painted menu board listed items in both English and Spanish.
And that wasn’t even the best part.
A second bus sat about twenty feet away, connected to the first by a makeshift outdoor seating area with mismatched picnic tables and sun-bleached umbrellas.
As I watched, a server emerged from the kitchen bus carrying two plates.
He walked across the gravel lot in the January sunshine and delivered the food to a table of customers who looked like they did this every Sunday.
My inner child did a backflip.
I found parking on the street and spotted Jacks leaning against a wooden post near the outdoor seating area, scrolling through his phone. He looked up when I approached, and his face split into that easy grin I was starting to associate with the feeling of coming home.
“All hail the conquering hero,” he said. “Should I bow? Wreath your brow in laurel? Request an autograph?”
“Please don’t. My ego’s already inflated from last night.” I gestured at the buses, unable to contain my glee. “Dude. This place is literally a bus.”
“Two buses, technically.”
“Two buses! And they have to walk outside to bring you food!”
“Welcome to Tampa’s finest dining establishment.”
“This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot with my travel schedule.” I was grinning like a maniac, but I didn’t care. “Why did no one tell me this existed?”
“Because you hang out in fancy downtown restaurants with cloth napkins and wine lists.” Jacks pushed off from the post. “This is where the real magic happens.”
I watched another server make the journey between buses, balancing a tray loaded with plastic baskets of tacos and what looked like the biggest burrito I’d ever seen. The whole setup was beyond absurd and the kind of thing I never would have found on my own.
“I love this place,” I said. “I love everything about it.”
“Wait until you taste the food.” Jacks nodded toward the ordering window. “Come on. Let me introduce you to the best carnitas of your life.”
“Bold claim.”
“I don’t make claims I can’t back up.”
We walked to the kitchen bus, where a woman in a flour-dusted apron was taking orders through a window that had once been an emergency exit.
The menu above her head was a chaotic masterpiece of hand-lettered items, daily specials, and what appeared to be customer reviews written on the board in Sharpie.
“Jacks!” The woman’s face lit up. “Haven’t seen you in weeks. You taco cheating on me?”
“Rosa, you know you’re my one and only.” Jacks laughed, and the sunlight brightened. “Just been busy with the bar and all.”
He leaned against the counter with easy familiarity. “This is my friend Skyler. He’s lived in town for three years and never been here. Can you believe that? I’m showing him how real Floridians eat.”
Rosa looked me up and down with the assessing gaze of someone who’d seen a lot of tourists come through. Whatever she saw must have passed muster, because she nodded.
“First-timer, eh? We’ll take care of you. You like it spicy?”
Jacks choked, coughing into his fist.
I shrugged and said, “I can do spicy.”
“Good. Some of these hockey boys, they can’t handle nothing.
” She winked at me, and I realized with a jolt that she’d recognized me.
Thankfully, she had the good grace not to make a fuss.
She didn’t ask for a photo or anything, simply turned to start assembling our order like I was any other customer.
I liked her immediately.
We ordered at the window—Jacks rattling off his usual while walking me through the options—then grabbed drinks from a cooler that had been retrofitted into what I was pretty sure used to be a bus wheel well. It was horchata for both of us, because Jacks insisted it was “life-changing.”
“If it’s not life-changing, you owe me another lunch,” I said.
“Deal. But it will be. Prepare to have your taste buds permanently altered.”
We claimed a picnic table in the shade of one of the umbrellas. The bench was weathered and wobbly, and when we sat down across from each other, our knees bumped underneath. The contact sent a jolt through me, warm and electric, but Jacks only shifted and kept talking.
“So,” he said, settling in. “Game-winning goal with 3.7 seconds left. Walk me through it.”
“You watched?”
Jacks scoffed as though I’d called his mother the whore of Babylon. “Benji almost broke a glass when you scored. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him drop anything. Finn had to restrain him from climbing onto the counter and dancing.”
I laughed, picturing it. “Please tell me someone got video.”
“It’s already on the Barbacks Instagram.” Jacks leaned forward, elbows on the table. “But seriously. What was going through your head?”
“Honestly? Nothing. That’s the weird part. Coach drew up the play, Erik made the pass, and I . . . reacted. Muscle memory took over.”
“That’s so insane. You had the whole city watching, thousands of people in the arena holding their breath, and your brain went blank?”
“Pretty much. You know how it is. The thinking happens before, in practice, in film study, during all the prep work. But in the moment?” I shrugged. “You trust that you’ve done the work and let your body take over.”
Jacks looked fascinated, maybe. Or impressed. It made something warm curl in my chest.
“Was it like that in football?” I asked. “The big moments?”
“Sometimes. The best plays were always the ones where I stopped thinking, read the offense and moved.” A shadow crossed his face, there and gone.
“I think that’s the thing I miss most, honestly, that flow state, when everything clicks and you’re not a person anymore; you’re part of something bigger.
I mean, I miss the guys, too. Being part of a giant brotherhood, even with some knuckleheads you might not wish were related to you. ”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “That’s it.”
A server appeared—a guy about our age who’d made the trek from the kitchen bus with two overloaded plates. The carnitas tacos were works of art: soft corn tortillas piled high with tender pork, fresh cilantro, diced onions, and a salsa verde that smelled like heaven.
For a few delicious minutes, conversation gave way to eating.
Jacks wasn’t wrong about the carnitas. They were incredible—tender, perfectly seasoned, with a char on the edges that added the right amount of crunch. The horchata was cold and sweet, cinnamon and vanilla cutting through the richness of the meat.
“Okay,” I admitted around a mouthful. “I admit it. My life has been changed by spicy pork.”
“Told you.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“I’m always smug when I’m right. It’s a character flaw.”
My fingers were dripping with sauce. Rather than lick them off like I might at home or with the team, I reached for a napkin from the dispenser in the table’s center.
Jacks’s hand shot out at the same moment, and our hands collided, his fingers brushing against mine.
The touch was nothing—accidental and meaningless—but warmth shot up my arm and settled somewhere behind my ribs.
Jacks jerked his hand back, grabbing the napkin and handing it to me. “Sorry.”
“No worries.”
Was his face a little flushed? I chided myself. It was the hot sauce. That had to be it.
We ate and chatted. Another server made the bus-to-bus journey, this time carrying what looked like enough food for an entire family.
A kid at a nearby table was trying to convince his mom that he could eat a burrito bigger than his head.
Life buzzed around us, ordinary and chaotic and perfect.
I asked about Jacks’s time at FSU, and he told me stories I’d never heard in any interview—the hazing rituals, the brutal two-a-days, the teammate who’d once smuggled a live chicken into the locker room as a prank.
“A live chicken?”
“His name was Colonel Sanders. He lived in the equipment room for three days before anyone noticed.”