Gildenheart 3 - Penn Station (Patreon)

Gordon Victor at seventeen starred as a running back for his high school team, the Lancers. One of the runner-ups for Homecoming King, he got paired with Sydney D’Arrow, one of the cheerleaders, for the Dance since neither of them had a date.

A small, giggly blonde with large breasts, Sydney had a reputation in the school. They danced with each other several times during the evening and he finally offered to drive her home at the end of the night. Southern California isn’t particularly cold in early December and Sydney in her short pink ball gown showed a lot of skin. Gordie decided he liked that in a girl.

“Turn here,” she abruptly told him as they cruised toward her house and he steered off the highway onto a side road following a canal. She gave more directions and they ended up parked in a copse of sycamore trees above the river where they made out for hours. 

He wouldn’t have thought it was possible but he ended up losing his virginity in the back seat of his mother’s aging Corolla with tiny Sydney giving him a full-contact lap dance and the sharp corner of a box of PUF Tissues poking him in his left butt cheek.

They dated a few more times that year and every date ended up under the sycamores. He gave her a bracelet he couldn’t afford at Christmas and matching earrings for her birthday in February but the relationship didn’t turn into anything serious or permanent. 

Still, his mother’s car smelled of rut and Sydney’s floral perfume for months. Sydney herself disappeared during the spring semester and he never knew what happened to her. In the fall, while waiting for acceptance to the Air Force Academy, he went to UCLA in the same car and thought of her now and then. 

The train slowed for Penn Station and Phyllis pinched him.

“I’m awake,” he protested.

“Just making sure,” she said giggling.

Gordie rubbed the back of his hand where Phyllis had pinched him. A nudge earlier had woken him and he had been staring out the train window, though there was little to see since they were still in a tunnel. Gordie had been hoping to wake up back in his own life, even if it were falling from 16,000 feet over a hostile landscape. 

No such luck. He shivered, despite the warmth of the train car with its three dozen or so occupants. All female, he remembered. Had there been a time when women rode trains in separate accommodations, even for a short commuter trip? Had he fallen through some sort of timewarp? Was that any harder to believe that that he was now living the life of a teenage girl?

“Whatcha thinkin’” Phyllis asked.

Gordie said, “I think I need to go pee.” Oh lord, he thought. How will I manage that?

Phyllis nodded. “We can go at the station. We usually do,” she added. 

Shortly, the train began making a lot of noise stopping, then it slid into it’s berth in a cavernous underground chamber full of sound and lights. Other trains were loading and unloading, too; there looked to be fifty tracks heading off in different directions and maybe a thousand people? Really? It made the crush he remembered at LAX seem like an old-fashioned dance.

Gordie felt overwhelmed but Phyllis grabbed his hand and led him out of the train car and toward a busy set of stairs. People pushed and crowded together and Gordie felt his ass get patted and stroked more than once. He knew his face had turned bright red but he couldn’t turn to glare at anyone because Phyllis forged ahead, the bigger girl towing him in her wake.

Besides, it was curiously exciting. Everyone seemed pre-occupied with getting somewhere but there were flashes of smiles and some laughter in the crowd. It did not seem to be an unhappy throng.

They went up two flights of stairs and emerged in a marble hallway echoing to the sound of hundreds of footsteps. Two quick turns and they stood in front of a wide door with a sign. The gold leaf on the frosted glass had peeled but Gordie read it as GIRLS, in all-caps, with an even more fading and peeling sign below it that said WOMEN in smaller letters.

A line had formed going out the door and into the corridor and they joined at the end. Phyllis pushed Gordie in front of her, saying, “You go first, you always take longer.”

Gordie giggled nervously. Now that they had stopped moving, he became aware of the cold radiating from the marble walls of the massive building. The line moved quickly and they were soon through the door where four lines of stalls and two of sinks filled the space.

“Take off your gloves, dummy,” Phyllis warned him as he headed toward an open door. He did so, stuffing them in his coat pocket, then entered the stall and latched the door behind him. The antique looking furnishings did not seem so remarkable as the fact that the stall was wider and deeper than he was used to.

But he wondered, how am I going to manage my coat and three skirts before I pee on myself? It was not as hard as it sounded, he just grabbed the back and gathered it all at once, then sat. Feeling around underneath layers of cloth revealed two things. Yes, he really was female and no, he wasn’t wearing any panties.

Yikes, he thought, but then decided it probably made sense with how much other clothing he was wearing. What must be a corset ended right above his hips and some t-shirt like garment extended a bit lower. If I ever take all of this off, how will I know how to put it back on?

He managed not to think too much on how different things were. The very present and practical need to pee helped him focus on that.

His water came out all in a rush but everything was a bit damp so he patted himself dry with tissues and discarded them. Standing up, he made sure to keep his skirts out of the toilet then flushed but getting out of the stall almost defeated him. Every time he lifted the latch, it fell back into place before he could get the door open. I can do this, he told himself, I have a B.A. In Engineering from the Academy.

He finally managed and emerged from his confinement at the same time as Phyllis came out of stall directly opposite.

They left the station next to the subway entrance on the Eight Avenue side. “The shop is this way,” Phyllis said, pointing up the avenue when she saw Gordie staring around.

The city that seemed as strange to him as a documentary about some foreign place caught in a time-warp. Old-fashioned bulbous-looking cars were everywhere and even how the buildings looked, nothing at all modern. A time-warp seemed likely; after all, was that any harder to believe than that he was in the body of a teen-age girl? One who seemed to sleep in her clothes, including what must be a corset.

The way people were dressed seemed odd, too. There were not many women in view and all of them he could see were wearing skirts. He couldn’t be sure of that because of the heavy coats everyone wore, but the pants legs of men were easily visible and no women in sight seemed to be wearing trousers under their coats.

Phyllis finally took his hand and led him along the sidewalk, uptown. In the street, the traffic moved briskly; it was still too early for the famously thick New York tide of Yellow Cabs but there were plenty of them in sight along with various kinds of trucks.

“Are you okay?” Phyllis asked. “You look like you forgot what the city looks like.” She squeezed his hand.

“It’s really cold,” he said, as if that made sense. In the deeper shadows between buildings he spotted bits of white that must be snow or slush. He shivered, wondering if he had ever been colder.

Phyllis laughed. “Put your gloves back on,” she suggested.

Blushing and feeling like an idiot for not having thought of that, Gordie pulled his gloves from the pockets of his overcoat and let Phyllis help him get them back on. “Sometimes you’re like a little kid,” Phyllis chided him and then gave him a peck on the cheek.

Gordie could only nod and giggle which made Phyllis laugh again. She already thinks I’m a dingbat, he thought. Or maybe a moron.

They trudged through the cold, crossing Eighth Avenue at Thirty-Fourth Street. Ahead loomed a massive building with lots of windows on the upper stories but very few on the ground floor. It took up what would have been half a block in other cities but was just one of four similar-sized edifices along the street.

A sign, marred by grime and neglect, apparently identified it as the Peronta German Factory. Gordie felt unsure of the first word; probably a family name, he decided. The second word confused him even more. German?

The building had two entrances, both with double doors. Phyllis chose the one on the closest corner which opened into a short hallway leading to staircases, elevators and a longer hall going deeper into the building. Several other women were either waiting for elevators or trudging up the stairs but all of them kept up a chattering commentary that Gordie could hardly understand. Most of them, he realized, were not speaking English, but it wasn’t German either.

He followed Phyllis up the stairs. It was warm in the building and by the time he reached the second floor, they had both stripped off their gloves again and unbuttoned their heavy coats.

An older woman stood in front of a desk at the top of the stairs, nodding and speaking to each woman as they came up, picked a card from a rack on the wall, stuck it into a slot in a machine below the clock and returned it to its slot before passing by the desk and through another set of doors.

“I got yours, Vickie,” said Phyllis, taking two cards from slots, stamping them with the machine in the clock and returning them to the wall. “Morning, Mrs. Carmody.”

“Morning, Phyllis, Vickie,” said the woman. “Oh, child, Mr. Spaight wants to see you in his office, first thing,” she added, looking directly at Gordie. “And you’ll want this,” she added, taking down one of the cards Phyllis had just replaced in the wall rack.

Stammering, Gordie tried to express that he had no idea where Mr. Spaight’s office might be while simultaneously trying to read the time card. Nothing at all coherent came out but he did manage to find and puzzle out the name on the card: Sarah Gordon. Gordon? Gordon is my last name now? That only confused him more. And why does everyone call me Vickie if my name is Sarah? he wondered.