"Oh, man. Just you wait until a little bit of controversy gets stirring around here. You're going to want popcorn, and you'll maybe even die a little inside, depending on the subject of the day," he chuckled. Christ, he'd remembered one poor woman asking about the morning after pill. That had been fucking brutal. The most innocuous of questions seemed to set off a chain reaction if the mood was right. "Yeah, I don't know anything about it, either. But then, I don't know anything about... ancient runes or genie magic either, so," he shrugged, not letting it bother him. He knew that he had his strengths, and he didn't find a lot of it particularly impressive.
He did laugh at her reaction to the very idea of dorms. "Your own apartment? Wow, that is college luxury living right there. Good ol' Grandma," he smiled fondly. "My first place out of my parents home was this ridiculous house share with other junior journalists, and it was basically one constant party. It definitely wears thin after a while," he admitted. But then, he would never have met Hadley if it hadn't been for those parties. Something good had come from it.
"No, it's not easy," he agreed easily, not even trying to pretend that it was. He nodded along with her thoughts; he wanted to encourage her and point her in the right direction, but he quickly realised just how hypocritical he was being. He couldn't fucking write one decent sentence if someone had a gun to his head. He was done, he was over.
"So, you'll end up a few metres away?" he joked, skipping past any more talk about how hard it was to write. She didn't need to know that she was talking to a has-been. "I can be an asshole, sometimes. I try not to be, but then someone pisses me off or says something stupid and the habits of my youth die hard," he admitted. "But I try to save it for when it matters nowadays."
She was far too good at poking right to the heart of any situation, she was able to point out obvious flaws in his logic that hadn't seemed obvious until she said it. He liked that about Abi, and he always had; she challenged him, pushed him to be better. To do better. To think deeper. "Yeah, I probably have missed out on a lot in that world, but I've also experienced things and people I never would've otherwise," he explained.
He caught the way that she was looking at him, and he really wondered what sort of question she was working her way towards. Whatever he'd imagined, it wasn't that. Ernest felt himself physically flinch, and his eyes dropped to the table top out of a shame that he hadn't really ever let go of. He'd asked himself the same question, answered it for Abi before now, but it never seemed to get easier.
"Because I'm a damn fool," he said softly, playing a little with the edge of a napkin as he spoke. "It was a terrible mistake. Biggest regret of my life," he admitted, no falseness of bravado to his tone now. He lifted his gaze to actually force himself to look at her again. "It was a strange time. I'd gone from a nobody to something of a celebrity almost overnight that year. I got swept up in all the big parties, big names, I got all wide-eyed over the rich and famous, because they knew who I was but I was still embarrassingly poor. Fife, she was new, rich, exciting, and she paid me attention," he sighed, and shook his head a little. "I was surrounded by very shallow sorts of people who actively encouraged me, insisted that she would be better for me than Hadley because she was... I guess more the kind of person they wanted to be seen with. And I liked that someone like her would want anything to do with someone like me. Then would go home, and see Hadley, and swear to myself that I was going to fix it, that I would stop it all. Then I'd see Fife and get myself all confused again," he was rambling on, and he didn't particularly want to get himself upset about things that were long done. "I'll never forget how it was when she figured it out... too late to say or do anything to make it even a little less painful for her, but really it had been too late long before that. Once I'd crossed that line that was it. I'm sorry, should've just left it at 'because I'm an idiot'. Sums it up concisely."