Peter was happy.
Sure he'd been running errands and playing chauffeur for the last three months, sure it was an unpaid internship, and sure he hadn't gotten to set a finger on even one piece of tech, but this was Tony Stark! He'd rebuilt his first engine when he was six! Peter imagined people would pay Mr. Stark to let them peal potatoes in his kitchen just to say they had worked for him!
So, as he crammed the pedal of the big Rolls limo to the floor to speed out of a turn, he felt happy.
All those errands (and his eidetic memory to boot) and he knew LA like the back of his hand. Let the billionaire playboy zoom down the expressway in his Ferrari (OK, it was a Saleen S7, but to a poor orphan, every expensive little sports car is a Ferrari).
"Try and keep up," Tony Stark had quipped, snapping on his shades as he'd walked past the open limo door and Peter beside it.
Peter didn't even have a moment to glow at the fact that this was one of the few times (he could now count them on BOTH hands) that Mr. Stark had spoken directly to him – he slammed the car door shut, dove behind the wheel of the limo and left tire track in the garage as he peeled out. He'd managed to match Stark turn for turn until that jam in midtown. Tony had merely made his own road through the throng in his tiny shiny car. Peter, streetwise and fast thinking, took the first available exit and roared down Mulholland Drive amid the quieter mid-afternoon traffic of suburbia. He was just seconds behind Tony Stark in getting to the tarmac at Stark Aviation at the Santa Monica airport.
Tony jumped out of his car and turned toward Peter as the young man darted out of the Rolls and popped the trunk. "You're good. I thought I lost you back there."
Peter thought his head would explode or something he was so giddy from this bit of dropped praise.
"You did, sir," he said, hoping he didn't squeak like a prepubescent kid (he was 16 after all). "I had to cut across Mulholland."
Tony quirked his head to the side and Peter knew he was bringing up the LA regional map in his mind and evaluating this pronouncement. Finally, he nodded and said "I got you, I got you."
Good god, Peter was going to float way on the airiness of pure joy. He couldn't have been happier if he'd built a robot that saved the world and Tony Stark had said he liked the paint job.
Peter pulled out the single overnight suitcase that occupied the trunk of the Rolls and handed it off to a flight attendant. Without a backward glance, Tony Stark jogged up the stairs to his private plane and Peter wouldn't see him again for a long, long time.