I'm running into an unexpected snag in my new ms.  It's tiny, I can work around it.  But it BOTHERS me--I can't figure out what to have Jason call Kae.

Now, that sounds silly, right?  He can call her "Kae."  Or he can call her nothing!  Since characters don't need to be saying each other's names back and forth constantly.  But I'm in a place now where he's supposed to be all sweet and concerned for her in a scene.  He says, "Are you all right, Kae?"  (I know, original!)

But it doesn't sound quite right.  It isn't intimate enough.  And when I leave a name off the end entirely, it really doesn't work.   It needs to be more like, "Are you all right, babe?"  Or "Are you all right, honey?"  Or something!

I keep racking my brain to remember what my high school boyfriends and I called each other so I can come up with something good.  But, with most of them, we just used our first names.  Or they'd call me "Min."  First Kiss Boyfriend, I called, "David," but when I was feeling particularly frisky, it was "David, my love."  He called me, "Honey" and "Honey Buns" and "Sweet Cakes."  (Talk about a kind of corny 15-year-old boy, huh?  Those names were so sweet, though!  Um, literally, I guess.)

My ex-husband and I called each other "Babe."  And when he was annoyed with me, he'd use an extra-sharp tone and call me "Hon."  (Short for "Honey.")  There was a block of time when I called him "mo-fo."  He didn't care much for that, though.  Go figure.

My husband and I started out calling each other "Lady" and "Boy."  (You can probably work out which of us was which.)  Somehow--and neither of us knows how--we switched to "Lover."  (We really do say that.  All the time.  We aren't even capable of using our real first names to address each other.  It's a sickness.)

I don't necessarily want to use any of those for Jason's name for Kae!  Is "Baby" too Dirty Dancing?  Or condescending?  "Dear" seems too old lady-ish.  "Sweetheart" and "Sweetie" seem too parental.  "Darling" and "Love" seem too... British, maybe?

What am I missing?

(I could always go with what my stepdad calls my mom:  "Ham hocks.")