i picked my poison (and it's you)

chapter one;

If Zak was being honest with himself, he had a track record of making bad decisions. It wasn't that he was necessarily out to make his own life harder or anything (that would be foolish), it was simply that what seemed fun in the moment often came around to bite him in the end.

This seemed like one of those situations.

Usually, the bets he made were harmless to everyone involved. Although competitive, he would still do the forfeit on the occasions he lost, and oftentimes everyone was happy with the arrangement. This time, however, he may have gone a little overboard with his confidence and, by proxy, the bet.

Okay, maybe a lot overboard.

If you lose, you have to bring a date to Vidcon this year. It seemed so simple, something that would be easy to do and just as easy to forget about later. The only problem was that Zak had happened to lose that round, and he didn't have anyone he could ask out. Which led to the current situation, where it was the night before the first day of the convention and he still didn't have anyone. Really this wouldn't have been that bad of a situation had he not been forced to tweet out about how he was 'bringing a date to Vidcon' this year, something that a large part of his fanbase had been quite happy about.

It would look strange if he didn't show up with anybody now.

Letting out a small sigh of frustration and dragging a hand through his hair, Zak considered his options. Realistically, he didn't have many ways out of this situation. He didn't want to give in and not do it, because then it would seem like he was poor loser, but it wasn't exactly going to be the easiest situation to resolve. How exactly did you go about asking someone out for one weekend? He was pretty sure that if he asked anyone he knew they'd say no, and besides that, literally everyone he knew were from YouTube anyway. There's no way they'd help him out with this.

He was well and truly stuck. 

The buzz of his phone ringing against the bedside table eventually drew Zak out of his thoughts. After a moment of silence, he crossed the hotel room carefully and picked the phone up, glancing briefly at the contact name. Baldboy. Great. Hesitating for a brief moment - should he really take this call? He kind of had something to figure out - he eventually sighed, pressing the accept button. 

"Bad?"

"Skeppy." His friend said, voice firm. "Where are you? We're supposed to be leaving the hotel in two minutes to go out to eat with the others, and you're not in the lobby."

With a brief glance towards the clock, Zak huffed out a sharp breath. "I don't think I can come with you this time. Go on ahead with everyone else. I have something I really need to resolve and it's kind of an emergency." Well. Not exactly. But he considered it an emergency, and therefore it was. He needed to deal with it now anyway. "I'll just get myself something to eat once I've taken care of this other thing, okay?"

Zak already knows that Darryl won't be pleased. He'd been looking forward to spending time together now that they were finally in the same place, and Zak had already promised he'd go out with them tonight. Unfortunately, he didn't exactly want to be in the company of certain friends right now. Although Darryl may not be aware of the bet he'd made, the others most definitely were, and they'd ask questions that Zak still hadn't found an answer to. Besides, they could all go out to eat some other night, it wasn't like they were going to run out of time.

"An emergency?" Darryl's voice had dropped a little, concerned. "What's wrong? Is there any way I can help?"

At that Zak fell silent, cheeks warming a little. There was no way that Darryl knew what he'd just implied, but whatever. There was no way he could involve his friend in this mess, and he doubted that Darryl would be able to find him a date by the next morning anyway. This entire bet was truly a lost cause.