Warning: This article contains spoilers for Off Campus season 1, now streaming on Prime Video.

Off Campus fans were expecting to see Hannah and Garrett fall in love in season 1 of the TV adaptation, but the sparks that flew between Dean and Allie were a curveball.

The Prime Video series is an adaptation of the first book, The Deal, in Elle Kennedy’s book series, and sees Hannah (Ella Bright) and Garrett (Belmont Cameli) find an unexpected connection after making a mutually beneficial deal — he’ll help her get the attention of her crush, Justin Kohl (Josh Heuston), if she helps him pass the philosophy class she’s acing.

In a departure from The Deal, season 1 sees Hannah and Garrett’s best friends, Dean (Stephen Kalyn) and Allie (Mika Abdalla) strike up a romance in the aftermath of her split from her on-off boyfriend, Sean (Riley Davis).

Dean and Allie’s love story is a fan-favorite relationship and the subject of the third book in Kennedy’s series, The Score. Many of the early relationship moments from that book were included in Off Campus season 1, and showrunner Louisa Levy reveals she originally planned to give fans even more of Dean and Allie.

“The original version of the season that I planned out gave them solely their own episode,” Levy tells PEOPLE. “But that was a 10-episode season, and we got eight. So I had to scrunch it, just a little bit, down.”

Instead, the focus of much of episode 6 is on the origin of Dean and Allie’s attraction, which takes them both by surprise. Levy says including the relationship in season 1 “feels the most organic because Allie and Hannah are already best friends, so they’re already baked into the show together, and Dean, of course, is in the off-campus house, so he’s there.”

“Because their love story starts out as a secret [in the book], I thought it would be really fun to keep it a secret from the audience and surprise the audience,” Levy explains.

While many of the moments in The Score have been depicted onscreen already, Levy assures fans, “They still have plenty of story to explore when we do get to their season.”

“We still have plenty to play with with them, but being able to tee that up in this season was really fun,” she says.

Both Kalyn, 28, and Abdalla, 26, knew before they were cast as Dean and Allie that the relationship between the pair would begin to unfold in season 1.

“I knew that Allie and Dean were going to be introduced … this season. I knew that before the audition, but getting to read it and see that we do get a whole chunk of episode 6 was really great,” Abdalla tells PEOPLE. “I think it’s a really fun, unexpected twist.”

“As a lover of the books, you don’t expect that, and it gives [book fans] the opportunity to watch something that they don’t [see coming],” she says. “They get to watch as an uninformed viewer, which I think is interesting.”

“It was really cool to do our own episode in a way, which was like a pilot,” Kalyn tells PEOPLE of episode 6. “It was really, really cool. I just can’t wait to do more.”

Season 1 of Off Campus is now streaming on Prime Video.