News & Politics

Food Money Sex: A Journalist Who Writes Erotica, Plays Dungeons & Dragons, and Has a Pregnancy Scare With His Girlfriend

In Food Money Sex, we ask anonymous Washingtonians to diary the food they ate, the money they spent, and the sex they had over the course of their weekends. Then we put it on the internet. Want to share your weekend? Email Mimi Montgomery at mmontgomery@washingtonian.com. This week:

Does: Journalist, 27
Lives: Silver Spring
Is: Male, bisexual
Makes: About $55,000 a year
Relationship status: In a four-year polyamorous relationship with a woman

Food

Friday:

It’s Friday morning and the house is empty. I’m in the middle of moving [in with my girlfriend and her roommates], so only half of the house is functional. It looks like London in the blitzkrieg. It’s been an experiment in how many meals can be made in the same bowl with the same spoon. Like an old cast-iron pan, the bowl is starting to take on the flavors of the various meals. The actual cast-iron skillet I hid from my roommates has not fared as well.

This morning it’s unambitious: Fruity Pebbles with almond milk. For lunch: brown rice with the last of the veggie balls from IKEA with some lingonberry sauce and balsamic vinegar on top. I also have a NibMor organic dark chocolate bar in the wild Maine blueberry flavor. I got a small box of these from my family at Christmas, and even after eating just about one of these each day, the box seems almost full. This could be a miracle.

I also make a peanut butter and jelly (aka strawberry preserves) sandwich. After, I pack up my clothes and head over to my girlfriend’s place, which is my new place. She makes masala-inspired curry. After I tell her I’m writing up a thing for Food Money Sex, she proceeds to tell me how it’s not actually a masala curry.

Saturday: 

Fruity Pebbles for breakfast again. There are a half-dozen other options, so I can’t pretend it’s desperation that drives me to this. I take the Metro down to Alexandria and grab Haute Dog. I go for a Bombshell veggie dog with Haute Fries. I’m warned the bun isn’t completely vegan, but I pretend not to hear. More of a guideline, really.

I get a Natty Bo and Old Bay-flavored chips when I go to the AFI Silver Theatre later. I guess that makes me a real Maryland resident now.

For dinner I make a salad. I’m listening to the James Bond audiobook Thunderball as I shop, so it makes me want to make a lavish, Bond villain-type of dinner. But this is Whole Foods, so I settle for a tomato, red onion, and cucumber salad with a nice vinaigrette. Who said villains can’t be healthy? Midway through dinner, my girlfriend roasts a few slices of locally made bread, and I have mine with a faux-lox “cream cheese” that only exists in the secret backrooms of a single Trader Joe’s where they test your blood for dairy content.

I buy wine with every intention of making sangria, but I wind up drinking it straight from the bottle as I take an old piece of machinery apart and make drunken repairs. I haven’t drunk enough to work up the courage to see if it will all fit together again.

Sunday:

I hit the faux-lox “cream cheese” again for an everything bagel with sliced red onions and halved grape tomatoes.

I start making a PLNT Burger-inspired burger for lunch, with blue corn chips and guacamole on the side, but then I realize I have a shit ton of kimchi left over and switch to making it ssambap-inspired, with kimchi and Korean chili sauce along with sautéed red onions and melted Follow Your Heart pepper jack cheese. I’ll trust your discretion and admit that I steal a black cherry Mike’s Hard Lemonade from the fridge.

Dinner is a handful of chips and a couple beers mooched off others at our group’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Money

Friday:

I haven’t even gotten license plates or a new ID for my car, but I just bought a Starfleet bumper sticker for $8. I spent $25 on gas in the new car. Not bad, all things considered. I spend another $8 for white model paint on Amazon.

Saturday:

I spend about $4ish for Metro fare and $12 at Haute Dog. My friends and I go to see Parasite, the third time for me, which is $12ish at AFI and $5 for a beer and chips. Not bad. Another $3 when I grab a beer on the way back from the bathroom halfway through the movie.

Then I spend a whopping $57 dollars at Whole Foods for functionally two days of food. Jesus Christ…

As I’m taking apart the old machine, I realize I could swap out a battery that’s been busted for years. It’s $40, but that’s cheaper than having a shop do it. It works. I’m technologically inept, so I hold a quiet party for myself in the living room.

Sunday: 

I spend no money all day. Oh, except for two $1,900 plane tickets for my girlfriend and me to visit a city in Europe I’ve dreamed of going to for years.

Total: $2,062, but $162 if you don’t count the plane tickets

Sex

Friday: 

Fridays are always tough for this because we haven’t seen each other for a week and have been yearning for physical contact the whole time, but yet there’s this post-work Friday crash that hits us both and we just want to collapse.

We power through it, partially because I want to have something in the Friday section of this article for Sex. It starts off well enough; what feels like an hour of just teasing, fingers slowly sliding across every inch of each other. But as things escalate, she starts to seem not as into things. She tells me she’s distracted, thinking about the fact that she missed her birth control pills by an hour or two from time to time. She hasn’t gotten her period yet and we’ve been a little…cavalier about safe sex precautions.

When we’re done, the first thing I say is “I’m sorry.” She assures me that we’ve had so much phenomenal sex that sometimes there’s going to be day-to-day sex that’s just really good. I feel a little better.

Saturday:

Still no cramps in the morning and that overshadows the rest of the day for both of us. There’s a moment, just a single moment as I’m walking through Whole Foods, where I feel a flash of anger. She said she’s sometimes inconsistent about what time she takes the pills. How could she be so reckless with something like this? I’d never say it to her, but it’s a sudden frustration that wells up…and then dies down just as quickly. On top of all of the other burdens in her life, she handles that without a word of complaint, and here I am upset about it. The anger recedes and I’m ashamed.

As I cook dinner, she mentions that she’s starting to have cramps and they definitely feel like period cramps. We celebrate in a way that anyone in the international fraternity of couples celebrates the long-awaited arrival of a period cramp after a pregnancy scare. It’s like a ship thought lost at sea pulling into the harbor.

I relax and watch Skyfall with my new roommates. I go back to our room and she’s crying, saying there’s no blood yet and they may have just been anxiety cramps. I hold her on the floor. She cries. I don’t, but I wish I could. I picked a bad weekend to write a Food Money Sex column.

We cuddle in bed, settling in and finding some comfort in each other. It’s been a rough day, but in the end, that’s a sweet, beautiful moment. Then I jerk off to Sailor Moon bondage porn after she falls asleep.

Sunday:

I’m more of a morning person than she is, so by 8 AM I’ve been awake in bed writing erotica for an hour. It’s a sci-fi story, but I’ve gotten too involved in the plot that I forget it’s supposed to be trashy sex scenes.

She rolls out of bed and goes over to the bathroom, then I hear a joyous shout a few minutes later. Blood. Oh thank god.

We spend the next few hours rolling around in the bed, me pinning her down, her wrapping her legs around my hips. She just put a fresh tampon in, so it doesn’t get too far, but it’s still a pretty joyous celebration of each other’s bodies.

Mimi Montgomery Washingtonian
Home & Features Editor

Mimi Montgomery joined Washingtonian in 2018. She’s written for The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Outside Magazine, Washington City Paper, DCist, and PoPVille. Originally from North Carolina, she now lives in Del Ray.