How do i know if im in love with my best friend

hi

I don't know if this is normal but I think im in love with my best friend. me and my friend have been best friends for seven years now. we shard all our secrets together and he would come to me first if he ever had any problems. he even told me once that i was a great listener. he was also the first person i would go to if i had a problem.

my feelings for him started about a few mounths before we left highschool and went to different colleges. after a year had past from us not being able to see each other much because of how far away we lived, my feelings for him got stronger.

a few months after we left high school he came round to my house, we started talking as we would normily and we talked about how we missed high school and our other friends. the convesation then started to becaome sexual and we nearly had a gay experiance. i was almost paralized in shock because of what he said. i was to scared to say anything. it was a long arkward sighlent moment. then he said he was curious and said we didnt have to if i didnt want to. after that we just started talking normaly as if nothing happened.

i didnt know what to think of the situation. i had never had a gay thought in my life and now suddenly i was just a word away from doing somthing that completly would have been against everything normal i would do. its now been one year later from that conversation. every time we meet we would talk together as if it had never happened, we still remained best friends. its only now that i am thinking of asking him if he loves me back.

the reason i say "if" he loves me back is because when we were seconds away from having that gay experiance, i dont think he was fully ready to be gay because he was at a really curious stage in the way that he himself was trying to find out if he was gay. after that day he never showed any sighns of being gay and he even had a girlfriend for about a mounth.

now i think i may be potentially bisexual because i think i love him. i want to be with him forever. and on top of that i have had gay thoughts about him.

well thats my story.

are my feelings normal?
should i ask him if he loves me and see if it turnes into a relationship of love?
if i do ask him if he loves me will it break up our friendship forever?
when would be the right time to ask him?