Jily oneshots

Bookmarked

by sunaprincess7

The Central Library was located on the main street of Stoke Newington, a suburb in North-West London that Lily Evans had recently moved to after years of living in Peckham. Lily loved her local library. It was where she went to feel calm, alone and content.

She had been in Stoke Newington for around eight months and had discovered the library six months ago and since then, she had visited it once a week. She worked as a solicitor and it was often stressful and mainly filled with reading long, dryly written case law and legal texts. So, Lily cherished the two hours a week she set aside to read something beautiful and imaginative and fun.

She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was that made the Central library so special but it had several beautiful features that added greatly to its charms. The first thing that attracted her to it was the tall mahogany shelving and wooded panels that decorated the interior of the library. In one of her geekier moments, Lily had googled the building and it dated back to the 1920s, having managed to survive the war. The dark wood had been in fashion at the time and was also beautifully made and so had never been replaced. It ensconced the room in darkness that was punctuated only by the bright shafts of light that beamed in from the long windows that were placed on the front face of the building.

To add to the library's prettiness, it featured a few lengthy desks with reading lamps and hard-backed chairs along with a separate reading area with four old grandfather chairs that were perfectly comfortable, if not a little worse for wear.

The final, and best thing of all about Stoke Newington's Central Library, was that had not been redeveloped in any serious way since the 1950s. Lily credited the lack of investment in the library for the absence of a computer area, any form of plug for phone charging or wireless internet. Indeed the only computer in the library was the ramshackle one for staff that must have been there for at least 15 years. The conspicuous antiquity of the library seemed to put off patrons from visiting regularly – or at least when Lily was there – and whilst it caused her occasional concern that the Council might decide to close her library, most days Lily counted her blessings that she could read in peace without the sound of the modern world bursting in on top of her.

Unfortunately, whilst Lily loved her local library, it did not love her.

In fact, most library's did not like Lily. The Central Library was the third library in total that Lily had been banned from. During her undergraduate degree, Lily had been banned from her university's library for failing to return books. The same thing had happened during her year of study for her postgraduate degree at another university.

Lily had always been excellent at paying library fines – she just had a habit of becoming rather too attached to the books she took home. That, combined with a perpetual forgetfulness, made Lily probably the worst library user in London.

It had only taken her three months to be banned by her beloved Central. She hadn't returned The Mayor of Casterbridge. She hadn't meant to keep it – it was such a small book that, when she'd finished it, she'd placed it on her desk and covered it with all manner of post, newspapers and notebooks. By the time she had received her first warning notice, Lily had removed the book, along with all the other debris and tidied them away. She then received a second warning, after which she'd gone to the trouble of finding out what book it was she had kept overdue. At which point, she had of course forgotten where she had put it.

After she searched for a week, then came the fine notice. Lily paid it but still couldn't find the book.

Peter, the manager of the library, who was always on duty when Lily was in, did not take kindly to this explanation. Lily offered to replace the book – this too was apparently not what Peter wanted.