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Louis was only eight years old when he decided that he wanted to play football professionally. He had been training for a little over three years by then and he knew it’d be hard work to be scouted by a junior league team but he’d never been one to refuse a challenge. He trained for hours, often neglecting both his studies and social life. He was the best player of the team by far but he always remembered to let his teammates shine too. All of the coaches and scouts he’d met over the years agreed to say he was promised to a brilliant future. He was almost there, almost at the right age to be signed. He’d led the local team to the final of championship. There was more than one scout at the game, all looking at him with contracts in their hands.
Sadly, as is often the case, life itself had other plans for Louis. All it took was a bad tackle from the opposite team’s defence. He didn’t need a medic to tell him he might have fucked his knee up. He had heard the bone crack and felt the dull pain. He didn’t need the surgeon to tell him he might never recuperate fully to know he’d never be a professional player. No recruiter hired attackers with wonky knees, not if they wanted to win competitions. He still tried to beat the odds, if only because he didn’t know what else to do. He’d never thought of a back-up plan, never thought he’d ever need one. He was back on the field within two months but he just couldn’t nail a game anymore. He barely made it through the first half before he collapsed from the pain. He stopped playing, never ever went to watch a game again.
He wanted to stay in Doncaster after his A-Levels, find a job and help his mother with the girls. The divorce had been hard on her and he couldn’t envision leaving her alone. She told him to go to University and try his hand at a few things to decide what he wanted out of life now that football was no longer an option. He signed up for different classes at Manchester University and tried to find new interests that could lead to a long-term job but he never did. He got into helping with coaching kids somehow and found that he enjoyed teaching his sport almost as much as he had enjoyed playing it. He loved being around the kids too, even when they broke his heart by playing like shit. He decided that he could do it for a living, he could teach sports to kids.
He met Haley around the same time he decided to be a teacher. He was high on life and she was pretty and they were both quite drunk too. It was never supposed to be more than a one-night stand and they both knew it when they went back to her place but they agreed to be friends, if only to put their minds at peace with what had happened between them. Louis remembered the night as awkward at best and he wouldn’t have repeated the experience if it wasn’t for the stress produced by too many finals on a same week. They weren’t a couple by any means. Relationships weren’t Louis’ forte so he tried to stay out of them. No girl had ever held his interest long enough to be called a girlfriend anyway. He didn’t plan on Haley to be more than a friend with whom he had sex sometimes and she didn’t seem to mind the description either.
But then she got pregnant with his kid and the timing was all wrong for so many reasons but neither of them could envision terminating the pregnancy. They talked it through, weighed up their options and eventually decided to raise the baby together. But they weren’t going to start a relationship. They weren’t going to pretend their child was created out of love when it was known fact that there had never been love between them. Louis was there for Haley regardless of the status of their relationship. He worked more hours at the club and took on a second job so they could move into a bigger apartment. He went to every check-up with her, cried when they got to hear their baby’s heartbeat for the first time and painted the room purple when they learned they were having a girl. He was there with her when she was giving birth too, holding her hand and whispering words of encouragement. They looked and acted like a couple, so much that they became one within a year of raising Emma.
The transition was so natural that Louis managed to convince himself that he might have fallen in love with Haley after all. They had been through a lot together and they were going to go through so much more for the rest of their life. He couldn’t find a reason to avoid a relationship with her anymore. Haley went along with it. She seemed happy with it too. Their friends didn’t comment on the change, which didn’t mean they weren’t judging it. Louis knew his friends were questioning his newfound feelings but they wanted him happy and he was happy. He had a beautiful daughter whom he loved with all of his heart and he had a job waiting for him at the end of his PGCE.
But life liked to play games with Louis and shook things up whenever he started believing he could have it all. The blow had come in the form of one Harry Styles. He was both the best and worst thing to ever happen to Louis. And he was the reason why Louis was here today, sitting in an empty apartment to think about all of those moments that could be worthy of a shitty movie with Katherine Heigl if the end was different.