I (17M) am in love with my bestfriend (17F)

So I (17M) have been best friends with this girl (17F) for over 4 years now. We’ve always been super close — the kind of friendship where you share everything. Life problems, random late-night thoughts, deep fears, embarrassing stuff, personal growth — all of it. We’ve always been extremely transparent with each other, and our understanding is genuinely something I don’t think I could ever recreate with someone else. We're both emotionally quite mature for our age, and that’s probably why our bond is as strong as it is.we’re both preparing for competitive exams in Jaipur, and we don’t live far from each other, so we hang out every 1–2 months, but we talk online everyday and when i say everyday, it's been years since we've went through more than 24 hours without texting or talking to each other.

She is super sweet and literally an angel by heart. She cares so much about me it's almost indescribable, and I just know that she will always take care of my heart. It’s a rare kind of bond, and I never expected anything to change.

But it did.

I had a girlfriend for a while, and I’ll be honest — that relationship was toxic as hell. She’d constantly hurt me emotionally, flirt with other guys, go on night outs with them alone, she even cheated twice and then manipulated and gaslighted me. I stayed for longer than I should’ve because I was emotionally attached, but it kept breaking me. Eventually, I had to end it for my own peace.

And guess who was there for me the whole time? My best friend.

She never said it directly, but back when I was in that relationship, she would act a little upset or distant sometimes. Almost like it hurt her to see me with someone else. Still, she respected it and stayed by my side. And after the breakup, she was the only one who truly showed up — emotionally, wholeheartedly. I don’t know when it happened, but I started seeing her differently.

I started noticing how beautiful she really is — I mean she has always been v pretty, she was the girl everyone wanted at school, even thought she always rejected them. She is an amazing person I don’t mean just physically (though, honestly, she’s so stunning she could make Aphrodite blush). She's kind, innocent, respectful and she understands me better than I understand myself. She makes me feel at home.

There have been moments that make me think maybe she felt something too — or still does.

Once I complimented her saying "I love your desi fits" to which she replied, “You should love me instead 🤬.” I laughed and replied, “Maybe I do,” and we both brushed it off. But that moment stuck. Also nowadays ,Whenever we hang out, we'd do coupleish things like taking cute pictures and making videos of us just hanging out. She'd put her lipgloss on me and say "now your lips are perf". We just vibe so good it's unreal.

She’s also said things like:

“I wish I could find your clone to date.”

And another time:

“We both know I’m not your type and you’ll never come to me at any point in your life.”

I once joked, “I’m not your type sadly, you wouldn’t date me,” and she hit back with:

“I can say the same.”

There’s also been this moment where she said something like:

“I don’t feel weird about you treating me nicely, I just wonder why… when you don’t even like me like that.”

That hit me. Because I do like her like that. Now more than ever. I just don’t know how to say it without shaking the ground we’ve built this friendship on.

All these little things feel like maybe there’s something unsaid. And now that I’m really thinking about it — no new connection I form will ever come close to what we have. Our understanding is on another level.

Recently i went to shimla with my family and I got her a cute handbag from there, when I told her I got her something, she was soo happy to hear it and said that I'm very cute for doing that. "Im just glad you thought of me" she said too. So im confused with something. When we meet up next and i give her the handbag, I'm thinking of asking her to give me her hair tie in return but I don't know if I should do that cause that would completely blow all cover and show that I'm interested in her romantically or maybe it's alr blown idk how I should proceed with it now. Should I wait for a couple months and talk about it after our competitive exams or just do it before someone else comes in our lives. Please drop some advices on what I can do from here.