My butt, a pit bull’s butt, and the butt of a Great Dane are pushed together to form a warped ellipses: three dots alternating between fur and purple polyester shorts. We’re sagging into the crevice of the massive, fluffy couch that will surely smell like dogs for a month. The pit bull is Fester and the Great Dane is Ripley, and after four days of pet sitting, they have nosed my heart back and forth between their oversized paws.
Ripley is a breathing piece of Gothic architecture, destroyed during World War II and reincarnated into the body of a Great Dane-boxer. 
He’s jet black, with high, pointed ears and white-tipped paws. His slender neck cranes upward past my hip and slopes sharply down to his spine, shooting to an elegant point between his long hind legs, straight back, and tail. His white chest serves as a tuxedo waistcoat, and a lumpy, upside-down white heart glows from the back of his neck. Before he curls up in bed, he prances in two or three impressive curlicues, like a kitten. Ripley believes he can fit in your palm.
If Ripley is Gothic architecture, Fester is a smear of mud. Cute mud, mud that’s sunbaked and vaguely golden. Her limbs are thick and muscly, and her large eyes are rimmed by warm, fleshy pink. She has the strong, cute nose of a pit bull and the dopey, wrinkled smile of a lab, both of which run through her bloodline. She moves like a cannonball. Fester bolts and careens into doorjambs and trees. She’s two thirds of Ripley’s size, but seems twice as huge due to the energy forever heating and collapsing in her core. Fester believes she could dismantle an army.
“Which do you think is alpha?” I asked Robby. We were walking them through Piedmont Park, trying to avoid those rampant, angry-looking animals that look like a blend between roosters and geese, with white bodies and bright red bulbs clustered around their beaks. People, seeing Ripley’s dark hugeness and Fester’s “go ahead, mess with me” jawline, made wide, awkward arcs around us. As usual, I held zipping Fester and he took timid Ripley. We reasoned that, while Fester is more work overall, Ripley could kill anything in his path if he knew he was 
larger than a kitten. Robby had a better chance at controlling him if something were to go terribly wrong. These weren’t our dogs, after all.
“I think it’s Fester,” he said. It was certainly close. Ripley held his own during wrestling matches, but Fester constantly schemed to be in charge. She bolted to cut him off, or scrambled on top of him in bed, or begged to eat first. Ripley, quite honestly, didn’t seem to care that much.
Later that night, the four of us sank into the couch. Fester let out a booming bark at nothing. Ripley sighed and put his head on Robby’s thigh. I stroked Fester’s belly when she wiggled her back into my lap and flung her legs in the air.
“They’re kind of like us,” Robby said. I laughed. I had thought the same thing the minute my friends dropped them off. Ripley is dark, quiet, and contemplative. If he were human, he would love math and movies about space. Fester, well, Fester is a mess. She’s loyal and loud, and would like parties too much and have a messy room with tacky AC/DC posters.
Robby and I have wedged spaces for walks into our work schedules, checked with each other on mealtimes, met up in the park for fun, exercise-filled evenings. Our teamwork and mutual enthusiasm have transformed pet sitting two relatively high maintenance dogs into a weeklong highlight reel. I’ll cry when Ripley and Fester go home. Their unabashedly natural personalities and humorously unique love for each other remind me of what’s easy to forget when Robby and I have tough days: Our stark differences flavor our life together.